April in the Garden

Harvesting Carrots in our School Garden

It’s April 5th and our School Garden is thriving at JWE!  I’ve been reflecting lately that this is the 10th year that I’ve been sharing my love for gardening with students in this garden!   The first year we were setting up the garden beds and it’s grown into a place of such beauty over the years!  Right now, we have carrots, several types of kale, brussels sprouts, lettuce, spinach, peas, green beans, peppers, cabbage and tomatoes growing in our garden beds.  We also have 2 peach trees that produce so many peaches.  Last year, every student in our school could come and pick a peach or two!  It was really the coolest thing!  

This year is a little different as I chose not to offer our afterschool garden.  School is getting more demanding and the garden club was feeling like a 2nd job… and I was only a volunteer to run it.  So two other teachers and myself picked a few beds to manage with our class.  It’s been working really well!  My class has 3 garden beds and my students’ families have donated seeds and transplants.  We are teaching the students the proper way to plant seeds and transplant seedlings.  Now we are getting to teach students to harvest.  

We had a few carrots that were ready to harvest and several students got to take a turn to pull them up.  They were pretty big so they were hugging the dirt.  Students had to tug hard to get them out of the ground. It’s pretty rewarding when a student picks a carrot and then later in the day randomly tells you how cool it was.  This one student said, “I’ve never picked a carrot out of the ground before… it’s cool to get to do that at my school.”  That makes my heart happy!