West End IB World School Garden Update
West End IB World School 2011 "I Can Grow" Youth Garden Award Winner
Our garden is growing strong! Even throughout this hot, hot summer, our students, teachers and parents have been able to keep the garden healthy and thriving. We’ve had tremendous volunteer support to help water and weed, and now we’re having a wonderful time harvesting our vegetables!
Our first harvest produced 2 gallons of green beans, 18 cucumbers, a flavorful variety of herbs and a few zucchini. We’re harvesting weekly now and it’s so exciting. We’re now selling our local, naturally grown vegetables at our local produce market. It is so fun to see our homegrown veggies in the market!
As a parent, I love to see my children and their friends exploring the garden, sampling the green beans, basil and stevia. At times they find some of the flavors pleasing and others…well, not so much. They certainly have developed a sense of responsibility knowing that they must nurture and care for the garden regularly in order for it to grow. They’re proud of their hard work and they should be!
We’re constantly amazed when we walk through our garden! To think that this delicate blossom (below left) that was a so much fun for one West End IB World School student and her mom to photograph, has, in just over a month, grown into this healthy, meaty eggplant! Our garden has provided our students and parents with a whole new world to explore!
For the most part, we’ve been lucky, but recently we discovered something is eating our zucchini and our larger tomatoes – and it isn’t us. We’re dealing with two different culprits: beetles and possibly squirrels. For the tomatoes, one of our teachers is planning to experiment and hang red plastic balls around the plants. We’ll see if such trickery works.
When talking to other student and parent volunteers who have been helping this summer, it is so heartwarming to see their faces light up when they describe their experiences in the garden. I am really looking forward to the students’ reactions when they return to school. By then, the garden beds will be spilling over with cantaloupe, watermelon and squash, and we’ll have so many tomatoes to harvest! ~ Julie Prince, West End IB World School
