1st Place Organic Gold Award
Learning Gate Community School
Lutz, Florida

Educational use of the garden:

The Seed to Soup Organic Garden explores the practice of sustainable organic gardening as part of Learning Gate Community's agriculture program.   The primary grades sow seeds, transplant seedlings, nurture and protect our soil by mulching the garden with hay, pull weeds, water plants, and search for the ever present hungry caterpillars waiting to devour our delicious plants.   Our new indoor garden classroom provides our students the shelter they might need during inclement weather.

Garden maintenance:

We weed, water, remove insects, count buds and flowers, and monitor our plants for signs of stress as part of our regular garden activities.   Even the Pre-K children can learn "wiggle, wiggle, pull" so that weeds pop out whole.

We learn to be garden sleuths by exploring in and among our newly established plants searching for the caterpillars who like to eat the tasty new leaves, the squash bugs who use our plants as shelter, and the beneficial soldier bugs who live in the ground around our plants.   As we learn about the insects living in our garden, we learn to distinguish between the "good" and "bad" insects so that we can carefully remove the unwanted pests.

In the summer when school is not in session, parent volunteers maintain the gardens and tend to our summer crops for us.

Social aspect of the garden:

Each class has a "Three Sisters" companion planting in the garden.   The sister crops:   corn, beans, and squash, are staples of the Native American diet, and help each other thrive by attracting pollinators to all of the plants.   After our companion plants are established, we'll move on to succession planting and ensuring that our newly transplanted seedlings will be successful.

As summer ends and fall begins, the classes have all designed scarecrows for the garden area.   We discuss activities that we associate with summer and autumn, and we talk about our expectations for the coming season for ourselves as well as our garden.   We have compost bins near our classrooms, so we discuss what goes into compost and make posters for the bins reminding everyone what does and doesn't go into the compost.

Our gardens give us opportunities to show our parents and community what we've leaned through our Biome celebrations.   We open the school three times each year to the public to showcase our progress and accomplishments in the gardens and elsewhere on our campus.   Other groups, such as the Tampa Audobon Society, Sierra Club, Native Plant Society, and IFAS Master Naturalist Program also use our gardens as outdoor classroom space.

Students' involvement in the garden:

Each class, Pre-K through 8th grade, uses the garden as an outdoor classroom at least once every week.   Classes are divided into small groups and rotate through focused center activities so that students can participate in all activities without becoming overheated, bored, or distracted.   Parent volunteers help out with larger tasks and with keeping the students on task.

Use of the garden's produce:

The edible plants in our Seed to Soup garden go to the kitchen for Rainbow Bar.   Our teachers encourage us to "make a rainbow on your plate" and eat fruits and vegetables of many different colors.   The leftover waste is added to our compost pile to feed new plants in our garden.   We leave some produce to die on the plants so that we can harvest the seeds for our next garden, and sell the seeds to our community to raise money.

Impact on students:

We learn many useful garden techniques, and we learn how nature works in cycles because we observe our gardens from the planning stage to harvesting, then back to planning our next gardens.   We learn how nature works in cooperation, like our butterflies pollinate our plants so our vegetables can grow, and how companion plants help one another.

We learn Language Arts through the journals we keep to record the progress of our gardens and our reflections on our garden activities.   We have to be accurate and use precise language when we describe what is happening in our gardens, but we can be creative as we use these observations to generate ideas of what we think will happen next.

We learn Mathematics when we calculate how long our seeds will need to germinate or how much our vegetable plants will yield.   We also learn how to average the height, weight, or volume of different plants, and we learn how to make graphs showing weather conditions.

In Science, we are exploring the wide world of compost by exploring what's in the compost bins and making terrariums to take back to our classrooms so that we can observe the creation of compost.   We learn about decomposition by observing the molds growing on composted food in our mold terrarium experiments.