High school’s garden wins a grant
Anzar High School is growing something more than vegetables in
its student garden. Anzar’s community garden was selected from more
than 1,300 kids’ gardening programs nationwide to receive a 2006
Youth Garden Grant from the National Gardening Association.
High school’s garden wins a grant
Anzar High School is growing something more than vegetables in its student garden. Anzar’s community garden was selected from more than 1,300 kids’ gardening programs nationwide to receive a 2006 Youth Garden Grant from the National Gardening Association.
According to Maryanne McCormack the school applied for the award a few months ago, after she called the Western Gardening Association to ask a gardening question.
“They suggested we apply for their annual award,” McCormack said. “The award was given to 150 school gardens throughout the United States and the event is co-sponsored by Home Depot and the U.S. Gardening Association.”
As part of the prize, Anzar received several gardening books and a $500 gift certificate to Home Depot.
Anzar’s gardening program is a natural outgrowth of its location among the lettuce fields of San Juan Valley. The project started in the spring of 2005 and is done through the school’s Service Learning Program.
The Service Learning Program is specific to Anzar School and designed to instill and foster compassion and empathy for the community within the students. Principal Charlene McKowen has previously described it as “glorified learning,”
“Because community service can sometimes take on a negative connotation, people think of picking up trash along the side of a road. Service learning is mutually beneficial to both parties,” McKowen said.
The program allows students to fill an identifiable need in the community and participate in a two-way experience. Anzar’s Service Learning program requires students to develop a significant relationship with a service learning placement provider that allows students to feel self-empowered to a leadership capacity.
Since the community garden grows fruits and vegetables, which are either given to organizations in the community or sold at their annual farmers market and the proceeds given to a charity of choice, the garden is a service-learning project.
The students in the gardening program work with master gardeners from the Monterey Bay Master Gardeners association. The master gardeners volunteer with the students in the garden a few times per term. Coke Farms has also been very good about working with the students and giving them advice about what will and won’t grow in local conditions, McCormack said.
Students do the research and determine what would grow best in this atmosphere based on the season and when they want to harvest the vegetables, but they are also dependent on what they can get donated.
For example, this year the students grew late season tomatoes during the end of the summer/beginning of the fall and experimented with a few new winter crops including mizuna – a type of Asian green – and broccoli rabe.
“We get lots of interesting donations from the community, Earthbound Farms has been very generous to us,” McCormack said.
Some crops are more successful than others. This year the students attempted to grow three types of peas, which didn’t harvest, but the mizuna turned out pretty well. Arugula, McCormack said, always grows well and the school cafeteria likes to use the greens students grow. The chilies the students attempted also would have worked, if not for the frost.
“The students last year wanted to try a citrus tree. We don’t think it made it because of the temperature, but we’re on the border, with the hills we get pockets of weather, some warmer than others,” McCormack said.
The students plant crops twice per year usually and this year they designed the gardens with aesthetics in mind as well – so they planted some flowers in addition to their normal crops.
In addition to the vegetable beds the students have an orchard of 12 fruit tree saplings they also tend to and recently planted a berry patch with two varieties of raspberries and blackberries.
The students are also in the process of clearing a space for a Mediterranean herb garden that they hope to start preparing this spring and planting this fall. There are also plans for installing both table and wine grape trellises. The FFA group also just recently built a greenhouse, so the hope is that the students will eventually not need to depend on donations from the community and can take grow plants from seeds, rather than seedlings.
