scratch. This garden not only now has a space for growing food that will be used in the cafeteria, but it also has interactive walkways and two outdoor classrooms for teachers and students to come outside and hold lessons in the garden. Was this undertaking worth it? Absolutely yes! However, I will say that it did take a tremendous amount of time and effort. One of the biggest lessons I learned from building the school garden, is that it truly takes the whole school community to make a school garden a successful one. So what do
on a tight budget, a local grocery store called Sprouts Marketplace, had a grant opportunity for a school to build a school garden and could be granted up to $20,000 depending on the project. We applied for this grant and thought, “We might as well shoot for the stars and go big!” After a few interviews with the Sprouts Marketplace committee, we were fortunate enough to be awarded the top prize of $20,000. Now that we had a better budget to fit our grand ideas, we then started with designing the garden and creating a budget. One of the main reasons school gardens fail, is that originally
I mean by school community? The
school community, is all of the people that it takes to make a school successful. This is from the teachers, to the administration, to the students, the parents, and amazing individuals in the surrounding area. I was fortunate to partner up with the PTA president and a parent of a child in the school that happened to be a retired Landscape Architect. Together, our little team of three was able to accomplish so much! However, we knew we didn’t want this just to be our crazy idea, the point of the school garden is to run for
just one person was interested in it, but then they moved on from the school and no one was there to take over the reins. With that in mind, we purposefully designed this garden so that if it was never touched again, it would still be a beautiful outdoor learning space for students. Jamie Patterson, our landscape architect parent, was a vital resource in helping us layout a plan to make this garden long lasting and functional. Next, we immediately reached out to local vendors. We knew we needed a demolition of the
decades and decades to come. Thus, providing an amazing environment and organically grown food for several generations of students.
current grounds, a concrete sidewalk so that our garden could be ADA accessible, and irrigation so that the garden would have a steady supply of water and not have to rely on people watering by hand. We also reached out to local nurseries and made a few visits, to decide the amount of plants and which plants would best suit our garden. We opted to do all of our produce in beds, for containment and better control of weeds. We also wanted to try to do our best to fill the rest of the garden with native plants to South Carolina. From our pollinators to our decorative
We were fortunate enough to start with some money that the PTA had put aside for this school year. While we were in the process of trying to design a small school garden
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