What's Inside
Our School Garden started with a single raised bed and a dream. With financial assistance from Seed Change and an abudance of other mini-grants our garden has expanded to 7 raised beds and a surplus of other educational extentsions.
In conjunction with Dr. Cathy Rehmeyer, the Pikeville High School ACES 2 class started a garden at Pikeville Elementary. To implement the garden, raised beds were constructed to separate the garden from the rest of the field. Raised beds are a rectangular prisms filled with soil. They can be personalized by painting the sides and can be covered to allow vegetation to grow in the winter. Raised beds can be made in a multitude of sizes to meet the gardener’s need.
Raised Beds
Students at our Elementary School were allowed to paint a mural on the side of the school building. Each piece was drawn and painted by a different student. The sidewalk to the garden is being lined with stones that have been hand painted by students of all grade levels. The purpose of the project was to beautify the area surrounding the garden and incorporate the arts into our agriculture based project.
Mural for the Arts
To promote organic gardening techniques, we use compost to help fertilize the garden soil. We take the food scraps from the cafeteria, along with carbon based items, such as dried grass clippings and twigs gathered from around the school. We then use the compost to enrich and fertilize the soil during the spring. This allows us to reuse items considered as garbage, along with promoting organic ways of caring for gardens. By using this type of fertilization, we are able to serve our greens in the cafeteria with no problem.
Composting
The pollinator garden is extremely important to the success of our garden at the local elementary school. The purpose of the pollinator garden is to attract pollinators such as bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds to pollinate the flowers. Without the pollinators, the plants could not produce the seeds needed to grow the garden. The famous Albert Einstein once said, ”If the bee disappeared from the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left.”
Pollinator Garden
This year, our school recieved a grant for a dropcam. With this dropcam, students are able to see live footage of the garden located at our elementary school. This allows students and other members of the community to observe and learn about the garden from offsite locations.
Livestream
In order to produce rich and organic fertilizer, the elementary students constructed two worm farms. Not only do the farms help to allow for our gardens successful growth, but they also make students learn the very important biological process of vermiculture. It is amazing to watch how excited the students are to see the decomposed material. They treat the worms as pets.