In Part I of Digging In, I wrote about the early history of school gardens and student gardeners in Seattle. In Part II, I'll look at the new wave of school gardens and explore a few around town.
The Orca Garden at Columbia School, undated. Courtesy Rainier Valley Historical Society.
The Edible Schoolyard
In 1995 Alice Waters, chef and educator, launched an innovative project in partnership with a Berkeley elementary school: the Edible Schoolyard. The project was well publicized and caught on: schools around the country started garden clubs and small garden patches. A new generation of families, steeped in the liberal ideals of the sixties and the seventies, explored alternative teaching methods outside the standardized academic curriculum. The school garden as a tool for nature study and food culture was revived.
Annalisa LaFayette remembers getting her first taste of gardening at a garden club at the old Denny Middle School in West Seattle in the miid-nineties:
"It was one of the after-school programs that was offered. It's where I first officially started learning about noxious weeds. We had a small, 10 by 30 foot plot, so nothing fancy, between two corridors of the building complex. The advisor, Mrs. Burrows, bought us a couple of bags of dirt. There were eight to ten of us; there were always students with disabilities, physical or mental disabilities, because, you know, it was a different way of learning that we had."
Seattle School Gardens Today
Not every garden can hope for the size and scope of Berkeley's one-acre Edible Schoolyard. In Seattle, school garden advocates face challenges ranging from finding space to keeping space once obtained, getting support from school administrators in the face of competing pressures, particularly today's evolving academic standards, and finding funding and the help needed to maintain a garden, particularly over school breaks. Even more recently, Seattle, like much of the rest of the country, faced a seemingly endless school break caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. While community gardens such as the p-patches thrived during this time, school gardens often withered on the vine.
Despite these obstacles, garden-minded teachers have persevered, finding nooks and crannies in which to plant and often contributing their own time and resources to maintain the plots.
Thabisa Mazur, Self Help Operations Specialist for the Seattle School District, reports that approximately two-thirds of Seattle's public schools have some type of outdoor learning space in addition to general landscaping. These spaces may take the form of gardens, raised bed planters, an outdoor classroom area (perhaps with small tree stumps to sit on), rain gardens, or simply a few pots in a courtyard area. Tracking the status of these spaces is difficult since they operate outside the district's standardized curriculum.
The connection of garden to school also follows different models. A garden may be fully integrated into the school's curriculum or, more likely, be offered on an extra-curricular basis. It may be a resource for all students or benefit a specific group, such as an after-school garden club or a culinary arts program. Produce from the gardens may be offered to the school's dining program, sent home with the students, or, in the case of some independent schools, donated to a local food bank or feeding program.
In this post I will take a look at a few selected school gardens, both public and private, that are doing well despite challenges, and consider the ways they are (or are not ) intergrated into student activities and academics. This is by no means a comprehensive list.
Orca School: The Once and Future Garden
A bay laurel tree is the centerpiece of the garden and provides an endless supply of bay leaves.
Seattle's Orca School has had a garden for more than 30 years old -- although not always in the same place.
In 1989 the Seattle School District moved the Orca alternative elementary school into the Columbia School building in Rainier Valley's Columbia City. The program, which had started at Allen Elementary School and then moved to Day Elementary, offered an emphasis on experiential learning and encouraged parent involvement. A few short years after the move to Columbia, in the early 1990s, parents organized a garden on the school grounds. Funds from the city's Department of Neighborhoods, along with community donations, paid for a design by landscape architect Barbara Oakrock.
Orca Garden became a premier example of what a school garden could be. Not simply a collection of pots and planters, but a carefully planned and executed design with multiple elements and lesson plans related to various subject areas. Students not only dug in the garden, they also carried out scientific observation, journaling, art projects, and mathematical calculations. In addition to plants, the garden featured worm bins, a sun dial, compost bins, a greenhouse, and seating areas.
The Orca Garden served more than just the school; it became integrated into the larger community. Volunteers from the neighborhood were encouraged to come and "Dig In!," especially during the summer months, a composting station was open to all comers, and the school mounted community events including a Mother's Day plant sale which continues to this day.
The school and PTA supported the garden program with a part-time paid coordinator. Kenya Fredie, now the supervisor of the City of Seattle's P-Patch program, had the role from 2003 and 2007 and helped shape the program. The program earned recognition throughout the region, including being named as an "Earth Hero" by King County's Department of Natural Resources and Parks in 2001.
Transplanted
"Every first day of kindergarten garden class, we pick a carrot, so for the rest of their lives they don't wonder where a carrot came from." (Anthony Warner)
In 2007, the Orca program was moved yet again -- this time to the Whitworth School in Hillman City, a school with a
history of gardening. Now a K-8 school with 400+ students, Orca set about recreating the garden on the grounds, utilizing space from a small playground and parking lot. In 2008 a combination greenhouse and classroom was built using a design by Rolluda Architects that incorporated recycled and sustainable building materials.
Anthony Warner was hired as garden coordinator a year after the move and has remained in that role for 15 years. Warner has continued to develop and shape the garden program into a nationally renowned model.
Warner describes how the garden is fully integrated into the Orca curriculum:
"I work with K through six every week. 40 minutes each class. The seventh and eighth grades -they come every other week just because their schedule is pretty wild. My job is just to get them excited about the natural world. And a lot of that is growing food, eating food, recipes. We also learn about medicinal plants, native plants. This time of year [winter] you know, we have to get a little more cerebral because there's obviously not a lot in the garden. So, we focus on salmon and salmon restoration habitats. And then also we are making these really cool native plant books where they study and do illustrations of native plants and talk about how indigenous peoples use the plants. So, it's a little more cerebral this time of year, but usually it's just really all about having experiential activities, you know, hands on eating. So, my job is just to grow the most amazing plants that kids want to touch, smell or eat."
Meanwhile, the original Orca garden at the old Columbia School is maintained and used by the school district's Interagency Academy in partnership with YouthCare. Students participating in the horticulture program earn high-school credit and a small stipend for their work in the garden, while also learning about food justice, permaculture, organic gardening, and water and soil management. Produce is shared among the students, donated to local food banks, and sold at the Columbia City Farmer's Market during the summers.
Ballard High School: The Greenhouse Garden
Ballard High has had a gardening program for most of the past three decades. Indeed, several decades earlier, the school was known for its World War II Victory Garden. Today the program centers on a large greenhouse attached to the west side of the building adjacent to a small outdoor garden. Science educator India Carlson works with her students to grow a variety of plants, including exotic species like pineapple and kumquat. Rather than simply planting crops, the focus of the horticulture studies at Ballard is experimentation, cloning, climate observation, and carniverous plants!
During the pandemic, Carlson kept the greenhouse going, cloning and distributing plants for her home-bound students to care for.
The Ballard greenhouse almost didn't happen. When the school was rebuilt in 2001, district funds ran out before the planned structure was built. With leadership by science teacher Toni Bukowski, funds were raised from the Ballard High School Foundation and the community to complete the work. The greenhouse is now dubbed "Mrs. B's Greenhouse," in honor of Bukowski who passed away in 2008.
Ballard High School Victory Garden, World War II. Photo courtesy of MOHAI.
Shorewood High School: The Culinary Arts Garden
The Shorewood High School Culinary Arts Garden offers a different model of school garden. Built to complement the school's longstanding culinary arts program, the garden is maintained by a devoted group of WSU Master Gardeners. The original garden was established by a culinary arts student and her father in the early 2000s prior to the major reconstruction of the school completed in 2013. At that time, a new garden was set up in a spot adjacent to the culinary arts classroom. It consists almost entirely of raised beds and containers due to the clayey soil
All students are invited to help with Wednesday and Saturday work parties. However, it is the Master Gardeners who take on the lion's share of the work, planning, planting, and caring for the vegetables, berries, herbs, fruit trees, and native plants. The culinary arts students harvest and use the bounty of the garden as needed, including their dinner events which are open to the public. Extra produce is donated to food banks and feeding programs, especially over the summer.
Funding for the garden comes largely through grants from The Master Gardener Foundation and other philanthropies. In addition, the Master Gardeners offer in-class demonstrations on soil health, composting, seeds, and worms! Bonnie Chester explains:
"We also do little short gardening classes inside the classroom in the winter. The first one we did was worms, compost and soil. We did three stations inside. We would bring stuff in and the students kind of rotate around us. And the last one we did a presentation on seeds. So I led the first presentation and talked about the ingeniousness of seeds."
Hamilton International Middle School: The Garden Club
The Hamilton Student Garden is a fairly new endeavor. Math teacher Andrew Melvin took up the challenge of establishing a garden raised by the school's Associated Student Body (ASB) in the spring of 2022. With permission from the school district, Melvin and his after-school garden club kids took over a long concrete planting bed on the edge of campus. Here they are experimenting with a number of crops, competing with the local rabbit population.
Melvin solves the problem of the summer break by assigning participating families tasks on a rotating basis. In exchange, they reap the summer harvestables. During the winter dormant season Melvin takes his group on field trips -- for example, to Tilth Alliance just down the road in Wallingford and to The Heron's Nest Outdoor Education Center on the Duwamish River. At the same time, the kids learn the basics of gardening, such as building the soil.
"One of the things we're working on is how can we keep growing the dirt and keep it healthy so that we can keep producing. So we've just started trying to compost." (Melvin)
The Northwest School: The "Temporary" Garden
When Jenny Cooper was hired as Director of Environmental Education and Sustainability at The Northwest School, an independent 6-12 school in seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, she was asked to help students create an urban farm and garden on school grounds. A section of an underutilized sports court was selected as the site of the garden in 2017. Shortly thereafter the school acquired another parcel of land allowing the garden to expand. It was understood, however, that both parcels would be required for facilities expansion at some point and thus the farm and garden were labeled "temporary."
In line with the school's philospohy of student-driven planning, Cooper worked with a group of upper class students to research, design, and build the garden and farm. All students, faculty, and staff were invited to weigh in on draft designs and to participate in the build of the garden which consists largely of colorful raised planters.
Jenny Cooper describes the many ways the garden was integrated into the school's curriculum.
"So we had a lot of art classes - drawing, ceramics, a public art class. There was a lot of mural making, furniture design, the ceramics class made labels for all of our crops in multiple languages. A lot of really cool art engagement. And then there were some science classes that wove it into the curriculum in terms of soil testing and chemistry, biology, life sciences. Some math classes used crop planning as problems, for example 'If you have a 4 foot by 10 foot planter box and kale needs to be planted 12 inches apart, how much kale can the garden produce?'"
Northwest School also brought garden produce into the lunchroom, somthing that can be a difficult "sell" in many school lunch programs.
"In addition to the food being incorporated into the school lunches, we also did tasting tables where we would give a particular ingredient, sometimes a more rare unique one that we grew in a smaller quantity to the dining hall crew. And they would cook up some delicious thing that then students would hand out to other students and faculty as a tasting and sort of educational component of like, oh, you know, taste this vichyssoise, potato onion soup made from potatoes from the farm garden." (Cooper)
Neo Mazur took over from Jenny in the summer of 2022. Her role thus far has been to revive and steward the garden as the school returns to in-person learning following the pandemic. While the school still considers the garden space to be interim and hopes to launch a capital campaign at some point in the future, it appears that -- for now -- the planter beds can stay put. Mazur is planning to replace those planters that are deteriorating with more durable materials that could be moved to a new location when the time is right. Meanwhile, the garden beds on the ball court have been dismantled and the student-built chicken coop removed. (The chickens have found new homes.)
Mazur is looking to re-imagine the remaining garden space and program and hopes to re-engage the school community in that effort. Her hope is to engage some of the school's affinity groups in connecting to the garden and its gifts:
"So, for example, our Black Student Union, our international student group, and our Jewish Student Union -- those are a some of the groups that I'll be working with to make deeper connections between plants and cultural heritage -- to be able to use plants to kind of tell the stories of people and their connections to the plants a bit more."
In addition, Mazur is working with several teachers on ways to re-integrate the garden into lesson plans. One artistic venture will be creating watercolor paints from plants!
Academy for Precision Learning: A Garden within a Garden
"The garden is art, it is food, it is science, it is social and emotional learning all the time." (Allie Dulles)
APL is a private K-12 school in Seattle's University District serving mostly neurodiverse students, many on the autism spectrum. Faculty member Allie Dulles conceived the idea of exposing children to gardening and, with the help of the school counselor, convinced school administrators to allow her to start a gardening program utilizing beds in the existing P-Patch at University Heights Community Center.
Participation in the garden program is offered as an elective. Dulles teaches K through 5 kids once a week, as well as a smaller group of middle schoolers twice a week. In building her lesson plans, she pulls inspiration from a variety of organizations, including Tilth Alliance, Learning in Place, and Growing Gardens.
The APL garden is still in its infancy. Students had a chance to experience the first harvest last fall and are now planning the spring planting.
"It's nice because the kids got introduced to the garden at a time where they got to pull snacks off the plants right then and there. And then it was: okay, the abundance has come, now we say thank you and we let it rest. And we take care of it for the winter." (Dulles)
Leschi Elementary: the RainWise Garden
In the fall of 2021, Leschi Elementary created a unique garden in a corner of the school property that combines raised planting beds with a rain garden and a stormwater catchment system. The effort was spearheaded by a group of parents and community volunteers. Partnerships with Seattle Public Utilities and IslandWood, an environmental education organization, allowed the school to build the RainWise garden, design an outdoor learning space, and install large cisterns to capture rainwater runoff from the school's roof.
Sand Point Elementary: The "Squirrel" Garden
Sand Point Elementary School, home of the Squirrels, has devoted a large area of school grounds to a garden with some dozen raised bed planters. The school's PTA sponsors an after-school garden club with groups for first to second graders and third through fifth graders. Even the pre-schoolers get to join in the fun with their own garden beds. A paid garden educator plans and leads activities.
"The Garden Club not only learns about growing food, but also gets to do cooking projects, arts and crafts, and explore subjects such as pollinators, decomposers, companion plants, and more." (Nicole Parish-Andrews, Garden Educator and owner/operator Foxberry Education)
A Green Future
One hopes that the school garden and outdoor learning movements continue, recovering from the interruption of the Covid pandemic and building a new generation of students engaged with the environment. Seattle public schools interested in starting a garden will find a willing partner in the district's Self Help Projects office which stands ready to ensure that plans reflect the district's guidelines for student safety and land use. The department is a valuable resource for fostering the dreams of teachers and parents in an efficient and sustainable manner.
Sources for this post include interviews with Andrew Melvin, Hamilton International Middle School; Anthony Warner, Orca School; Allie Dulles, Academy for Precision Learning; Jenny Cooper and Neo Mazur, The Northwest School; Bonnie Chester, Shorewood High School and Master Gardeners; Mikala Woodward; and AnnaLisa LaFayette; and correspondence with Thabisa Z. Mazur, SPS Self-Help Projects; Kenya Fredie, Seattle P-Patch Program; India K. Carlson, Ballard High School; Nicole Parish-Andrews, Foxberry Education and Sand Point Elementary School; and Lucas Thompson, YouthCare.
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