2nd Place Organic Silver Award
Novato Charter School
Novato, California

The Novato Charter School (NCS) has been an operating charter school since 1996, located, since 2001, at the old Hamilton Field military base in Novato. In July 2001 NCS began to develop a garden at our new school grounds on a site that was, for 40 years, the parking lot of Hamilton Air Force Base. Beginning with very hard-packed rocky soils over sandstone and bedrock, not to mention occasional archaeological wreckage of building deconstruction, the site presented a unique opportunity for transformation from its military background into a verdant, productive, and educational garden for children. Through this on-going transformation the children learn how nature can be nurtured by human intervention, and how human intervention can, in turn, be supported by nature.

As with most public schools, the NCS school garden has a limited budget, but has grown rapidly with the benefit of organic and permaculture techniques. These old-world “strategies” arose from difficult situations where raw ingredients were all that were to be had. Resource consciousness informs our decisions so as to cut down on costly inputs. Techniques using cardboard for sheet mulching (to eliminate weeds), mulching with hay and wood (to increase soil moisture and texture), cover cropping (to increase fertility), and seed saving for future crops are all practiced in the NCS garden.

At our school you will find compost and recycling bins in every classroom. The students at NCS will gladly tell you where to put your leftover lunch, including details about which garden compost bin is accepting foodstuffs and whether we’re feeding the worms or not on any given day. (They will also let you know what NOT to give the worms). Here students have learned to recycle and compost the same way they have learned to jump rope: by practicing a little every day.

In the NCS garden we place an emphasis on edible annuals, native perennials, and habitat plants; in short, food and shelter for all beings. We use everything from butterfly and hummingbird plants to a frog habitat to gourd bird feeders to orchard mason bee homes and a barn owl house to invite creatures big and small to our garden. And it works! Class instruction is often interrupted by the welcome appearance of an irresistible bird, bug, or amphibian.

The first grade through the fifth grade all have one class a week for forty-five minutes. Our emphasis is on organic gardening techniques, nutrition, botany, social and earth sciences. First and second graders sing about plant parts, decomposition and the water cycle, while fifth graders fill their garden journals with such things as seed biology, studies of the adaptive characteristics of succulents, and compost temperature logs. The third grade social studies farm block is enhanced by the harvest of cotton, flax, and dye plants as well as a farm store to complement their math and money unit (parents pay top dollar for fresh blue-green eggs from the NCS chickens!). The budding fourth grade California historians tend the native plants garden and learn about how our Miwok predecessors used these generous plants. At NCS we are proud of our organic gardening techniques. Each student learns to identify the beneficial insects and plants in our Integrated Pest Management beds.

Sometimes garden class is quite sedentary, with students learning at the big chalkboard or taking notes in their garden journals. And other times the students love to just work HARD. Together, we have mulched with three different kinds of donated mulch nearly half an acre of land, moved a five-cubic foot compost pile, built composting and vermiculture bins, scarecrows, brooms from broom corn, bird houses, bird baths, and orchard mason bee homes. Over the past five years we have planted hundreds of seedlings, thousands of seeds, and fifteen sapling trees.

Trees are the critical plant in this landscape, for they offer shelter in the blistering sun. With the help of industrious parents, we have planted fruit trees and an enchanted Redwood forest. At parent workdays we have also built a deer fence, a chicken coop, and a small farmyard. Families tend our garden in the summer, making sure thirsty plants are watered through our California dry months.

There is nothing the NCS children love more than harvest time. Winter Greens Soup! Chard Wraps! Cucumber and Tomato Salad! Parents are delighted by the dishes their children gobble up on garden cooking days. Teaching the fundamentals of nutrition becomes an easy challenge when our students sit at the NCS picnic tables and munch on delicious crops they have sown, tended, harvested, and prepared themselves.

The Novato Charter School garden is a place where children learn respect and care for the natural world. As they learn and work they become responsible stewards of their environment and in return they experience the great joy and richness a well-tended plot of land will offer.