New School Garden at Betsie Valley Elementary

by Lianna Bowman, FoodCorps

Despite the on-and-off drizzle and the last-week-of-school jitters, last Wednesday (6/11/14), Mr. Luebke’s 3rd grade class and I headed outdoors at Betsie Valley Elementary to get to work on their brand new school garden.  We had delivered three raised beds and a load of compost a couple days before, and after much discussing over the “where” and the “how,” it was finally time to put the 3rd graders to work!

We split into two groups.  The “woods” group went to gather more top soil from the surrounding forest, and the “weeds” group pulled up weeds from the ground where we would place the beds.  You could see the students getting totally absorbed in their tasks, dirt and weeds flying back and forth.

One student had so much fun pulling up sod that he wanted to take a sod chunk back to class with him!  (Don’t worry custodial staff, he was finally persuaded to leave the sod outside).

But alas, time flies when you’re having fun. After 45 minutes outside, we had barely filled just one of the beds!  So it became a multi-day project for the 3rd graders, and on their last day of school, they planted five tomato plants.

Mr. Luebke and I planted a cover crop of peas and oats in the remainder of the new bed space, and he is organizing families to be in charge of watering for a week at a time over the summer.  Here’s hoping we get a beautiful crop of tomatoes for students in the fall!