Hidden gems, butterfly rest stops and edible schoolyards
Published: June 30, 2008
The Richland Avenue Elementary School garden is a hidden gem in the middle of West Los Angeles. Once a community garden, the one-acre plot had lain fallow for two years. “It was like a jungle,” says Richland Avenue Principal Ellen P. DeLeston. Parent volunteers and workers from the California Conservation Corps, a state workforce development program for young adults, spent two years helping clear the land, design a garden and build planter boxes.
“It’s been a real collaborative effort,” says DeLeston. “We have such dedicated parents. We got grant money and funds from the [Los Angeles Unified School] District. When the funding died out, there was a period when we had 10 young people from the corps here every day. The parents saw the garden as a gem.”
The school also gets support from Urban Farming, a nonprofit organization that helps establish school gardens in Los Angeles, Detroit and other major U.S. cities and also has projects in Montego Bay, Jamaica. The William Morris advertising agency designated the garden as a service project for company employees, who dedicated a day to working on improvements. LAUSD school board member Marlene Canter, an avid school garden supporter, also participated in the work day, as did Richland Avenue fourth-graders.
Last Halloween, the garden produced enough pumpkins for each of the school’s 20 classes to carve its own homegrown jack-o’-lantern. The school has also contributed 50 pounds of fruit and vegetables to the Westside Food Bank.
The garden is thriving, but money continues to be a problem. “It would take $10,000 a year to maintain the garden the way we’d like,” DeLeston says. “We’ve applied for and received grants, but we need a permanent funding stream and so far we haven’t found one.”
Parent volunteer Kami Turrou, who has a second-grader at the school, says materials for each classroom planter box costs about $200. “The state values school gardens and likes school gardens, but funding is a challenge.” Parent fundraising efforts have generated between $5,000 and $6,000, Turrou says, and ‘we’ve been able to do a lot with that money.”
“To have an acre in the middle of West Los Angeles is amazing,” Turrou says. “We’re so lucky to have green at
our school.”
Turrou says her son and husband sometimes groan when she tells them it’s time to put in some extra work on the garden. “But once they get there and start working, they’re smiling and having fun.”
The big Kahuna
The most famous school garden of all is probably the Edible Schoolyard at the Martin Luther King Middle School in the Berkeley Unified School District, established by world-renowned chef and organic food advocate Alice Waters.
In addition to a garden, the Edible Schoolyard has an outdoor eating area, classroom and demonstration kitchen. Waters provides financial support for the garden and also pays the salary of the district food service coordinator charged with making locally grown produce a regular part of cafeteria fare at all Berkeley schools. Clearly, this is a Cadillac program that few if any other districts could duplicate. Still the local effort has global benefits, generating international publicity for school gardens. —Carol Brydolf
Monarch rest stop
The Los Cerritos Elementary School’s Urban Farmyard in the Long Beach Unified District has the unique distinction of being an official “way stop” for migrating Monarch butterflies during their long trek from Canada to Mexico.
Land once designated for a parking lot is now a well-stocked garden with 22 raised beds. In addition to crops, the farmyard also includes nine hens, six rabbits, one rooster and a guinea fowl. Every teacher and all 360 students at the school work in the garden, which organizers say is “not the typical big city experience.”
This garden was the brainchild of second-grade teacher Dianne Swanson, who was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year in 2007 by the California Foundation for Agriculture in the Classroom.
“At the end of the school year, when my students are able to recognize the true significance of agriculture and its relationship to their daily lives, I feel that I have done my part in educating them about real-life subjects that matter,” she says.
—Carol Brydolf