In March, I received your mailing for the 2001 School Garden Awards and spoke to my class about entering the contest. We had a few obstacles to overcome, the largest being that we didn’t have a garden. To sell our idea to the school administration, we had to demonstrate a need for the garden within our school program. In structuring our proposal, we set forth the educational use for the garden, but we have already witnessed its use outside of our design. The garden is open for the whole school to visit and use for any classroom purposes. Because we were late in getting approval and thus in planting, the main educational focus is geared toward activities from September through November. We chose our crops with this in mind and focused on providing the school with lots of pumpkins for our school’s Fall Festival. In addition, we picked different plants so teachers could demonstrate root, vine, and bush vegetables and their various growing patters. Our first grade teachers needed to illustrate plant growth from start to finish so we selected radishes for a quick way to show the process. Kindergarten planted flower seeds in the classroom and some of the seedlings were put in the garden. To our delight one of our summer reading support classes used the garden to set the background for a unit that dealt with gardening stories. In many ways, the garden has become another classroom in our school.

The garden was planned, planted, and maintained during the school year and summer vacation by our second grade class. Nearly ten students and parents continue the work on a weekly basis. So far the small crops of onions, radishes, and lettuce, which were planted for some quick spring lesson ideas, have been sorted and used by the families doing the summer maintenance. We have arranged to donate our peppers and tomatoes to the local food bank as they are less perishable and will produce larger numbers of vegetables. Of course, the main focus of our garden will be the pumpkin lessons and activities in the fall.

While discussing what has been learned so far from gardening, the students fired off a litany of "surprises":

• Radishes don’t grow bigger and bigger; they sometimes get a flower instead.
• Pumpkins are very small and green when they start.
• Soil is hard and needs digging and loose soil added to make things grow.
• Not all soil has lots of worms. (We talked about worm composting.)

With each visit there were new discoveries. As a teacher, I saw my students taking pride in their efforts as the garden flourished. Also, I found that my second graders were ready for the responsibility of managing a garden, and I began to think of it as a regular part of our classroom.