Tag Archives: garden

Spring Renewal – Starting with the Soil

Posted on by rhondacarrier

We have the grade 5 section of the school student garden ready for planting again and with a lot of help from students. It never fails to amaze me that when I step outside with garden tools, students coming running to see what they can do. Three weeks ago after school, I entered the garden area with shovels and a bag of compost. Students in the school aftercare program were on the nearby playing field but I had 4 volunteers leave their game to help before I even started to work. The grade 5 science classes had removed the weeds the day before, so the aftercare group turned over the soil to loosen it, mixed in the compost and turned it again. They also added mulch to the walking paths between the rows.

Early this week at recess, I went out to work and again instantly had students volunteering to help, this time leaving their recess games to work. We have a new pile of soil beside the garden that the students used to build up the rows where we will plant. The garden was rained on since then, has had time to settle, and is ready for planting.

Tomorrow students will plant their seeds – the seeds that they gave me during Catholic Schools week. We have tomato, pepper, radishes, carrots and lima bean seeds. They are anxious to get started and anxious to see the first seed leaves poking through the soil.

Grade 5 section of the garden is ready for planting.

School Garden

Posted on by rhondacarrier

During the last school year, I watched the development of a new garden at school. On 2/1/2011 Father Jose George blessed the garden that the grade 8 students had planned and planted. Younger students got involved learning how to weed and helped to harvest some of the young carrots. (View their slideshow!) What a wonderful hands-on education about health, nutrition, and Florida ecosystems. I wasn’t involved in the initial development of the garden, but this school year, starting in August 2011, three science teachers will share the responsibility of  developing the garden with our middle school science students. I am one of those teachers and I’m delighted to be part of the project. We will also get younger students involved with this garden and other projects.

Solarizing the Garden Soil

Posted on by rhondacarrier

Last June after the close of the school year, we decided to solarize the garden for the summer. We removed weeds, then borrowed a rototiller to loosen the soil. Next we added several bags of compost from a nearby farm. The final steps were to wet the soil, and then to cover the soil with a clear plastic. The purpose of the plastic was to solarize the soil:

Soil solarization is a practice used to manage weeds, nematodes, diseases, and insects in soil. The soil surface is covered with clear plastic, which allows sunlight to pass through and heat up the soil to temperatures that are lethal to many of these pests. If effective, solarization can reduce population levels of these pests for 3-4 months, sometimes longer.(Read Introduction to solarization on ifas website)

We weighted the edges of the clear plastic with soil, boards and cement blocks to seal the edges as best as possible to retain the heat under the plastic. In the first photo, the lower layer is solarized with the plastic, but the upper layer of the garden is still a mass of weeds. The second photo shows both layers of the garden covered with the plastic. Then we left it to the Florida summer heat to do the work.

solarizing

solarizing