We visit a middle school once a week and are showing them how to grow several varieties of lettuce in  "lasagna" beds. These are layered piles of straw, alfalfa, bone meal, blood meal, and compost. These are really naturally decomposing compost heaps, which are perfect parallels to their earth science lessons. We made a goal of producing six hundred heads of lettuce during the school year and the students will learn, along the way, the nutrients in lettuce, how long it takes to grow, the many varieties, and how much room it needs to grow, to name a few. 

The two teachers involved are very active in these "lessons" as they make the visual, hands on experience relevant to the teachers school plan.They interact as much as they can or want to. The gardening is used as much to grow plants as it is to make science of the natural world more understandable to the students. If they can see it, it makes more sense. We are ultimately teaching the teacher how to use a garden experience to augment their own teaching plan! When these teachers feel capable to teach using the garden, then we have done our job. The relationship we build at the school between principal, teachers and students is vital for a school program to become sustainable.

At an elementary school, we augment their existing garden efforts by coming in once a week and taking groups of ten students at a time out to the garden, about one half hour each. The students are learning the basics of maintaining a garden; the weeding, the harvesting, the soil amendment, and the production flow of keeping seedlings started to have ready to replace a harvested plant. Over a period of time, these students will be able to identify on their own what needs to be done in that garden and will be able to do a little every time they are out there, as a team. Eventually, the teacher will be able to take twenty or so students out by herself. They learn new vocabulary words relating to the environment and as they find an interest, like bugs, we stop to look, talk, and explore about the subject.

Our focus in this particular program is to train the students to look around and notice and care about their environment. This age group needs more supervision. You don't just hand a trowel and say "take out the weeds". They'll take out everything or dig holes. So we are training them to do very specific tasks. Each group of ten chooses a spokesman for the group and we go back to class and they relate to the others what they did. We've seen students who are usually shy, volunteer to be the spokesman. It is here that the teacher takes the opportunity to develop a dialogue with the students and she brings their experience to relevance to her subject matter. We remind the students repeatedly that they have a job in the bigger world, which is to be a student. A student's job is to learn. They learn outside and bring it back to class.

As with all school programs, the relationship with the Principal, teachers, students, and plant manager is vital for a sustainable garden.