Green Market!

Come to the Green Market, Saturday, 3/20, from 10-2pm at SPE! Bring batteries, cell phones, iPods, GPSs, video games and consoles, laptops, inkjet cartridges, used DVDs, clothes and household items to recycle! Join us for games, green activities, art projects, cooking demonstrations and the chance to buy herbs, seeds, fresh fruits and veges and organic, local products created by folks in our community!

The market is free and open to all!

2010 Update

Our SPE little gardeners have been working hard preparing to sell their plants and seddlings at our SPE GREEN MARKET. If you look at the beds right now you will see the amazing growth of the last month since Mr. Londono, Ms. Brisuela, Ms. Hendrickson and Mr. Bogart sowed their seeds with their students.

The third garden bed has been cared by the Save the Planet Club and the Gardening Club. The Gardening Club is off to a great start too. This past month, they planted pineapples, peppers and took care of the beds.

Depending on future donations and grant support, we plan to add new garden beds so more students and teachers can have a personal stake in the garden. If your class would like to be involved, please send an email to southpointepta@gmail.com.

Welcome to 2010!

If we have one resolution at the garden this year, it is to expand student participation. Over the break, while tomatoes proliferated and banana trees grew to new heights, we planned for a student takeover of the garden. Starting this month, an afterschool gardening class will be offered at SPE for kids from grades K-6th. Jamee Garland - a teacher, green activist and environmentalist - will lead the classes with appearances by guest lecturers. We would also like to welcome our new garden caretakers: the students in Ms. Hendrickson’s, Mr. Bogart’s, Mr. Londoño’s and Ms. Brisuela’s classrooms and Ms. Arsenault’s Save the Planet club. The classes and afterschool clubs will each inherit half a garden bed to cultivate. At the garden we are happy to turn over many new leaves in 2010! Watch us grow.

Giving Thanks

At the garden, we have many reasons to be thankful:

Thank you to everyone who worked in the Banana Grove last month. It was exhausting, but the cloud cover, bagels, coffee, muffins and camaraderie made it all bearable. Thank you to Jonathan who delivered and unloaded a truckload of mulch, to Steve who tilled the Smoothie Garden and to Neal, Liz, Leslie, Rasheeda, Katie, Victoria, Kimberly and Peter who pulled up roots, unloaded bags of mulch and spread it around. Thank you to baby Jack who sat quietly while his mum, Katie, worked!

Thank you to Peter who put the new bed together and to Kimberly and Catherine who spread tarp underneath it and to Neal who filled it with good soil, peat moss and vermiculite.

Thank you to Steve who tilled the sunflower bed, to Neal and Andy who brought up the soil and to Victoria who spread the soil. It was a communal effort - and we are fortunate to have so many parents on board who aren't afraid to get dirty ;-).

In the next few months, we’re transitioning garden plots to classroom teachers who have shown interest. We have identified the teachers and will work closely with them in the upcoming months. We are thankful for their adventurous spirit and enthusiasm for the gardens!

Thank you to Adam Mopsick, who is working on irrigating the gardens.

Special thank you to Jason Russell, Andy Augusta and Andy Prescott for putting the shed together! Once it's secured, we'll have a place to store all the garden supplies! And, thank you to Eric and Victoria Elliott for bringing hundreds of pounds of bricks to the Banana Grove, which will act as a border to keep the mulch in. Thank you to the random volunteer who helped me lay some of the bricks.

We've also begun a butterfly garden by the school store in memory of Betty Arsenault's father who passed away last month. Thank you to Jason Russell for transplanting the Porte Weed and Small Milkweed plants and to our children who cleaned out the Sunflower bed and sowed seeds.

Thank you to the Criscitos and the Benzels for their generous donations to the garden. With their donations we’ll be able to purchase more butterfly-attracting plants to the gardens and seeds for the teachers to sow in the new year.

Thank you to Geane and to the school administration, which continues to support our efforts as the garden grows! New grass on the great lawn compliments our green efforts.

Thank you to the plants which grow and proper almost in spite of us – our green cherry tomatoes are now turning red, the heirlooms are rounding out and the broccoli plants have just sprouted tiny heads.

Thank you to chef Cindy Hill who uses the produce from the garden in her cooking class!

Thank you to all the green garden volunteers for all their work – their minds and their muscle! Without them, none of this would be possible.

Harvest/Update

Thanks to a grant from Slow Food Miami, our garden will continue to grow! This weekend at Fairchild's Edible Garden Festival, SPE's Organic Edible Garden was given a garden bed and a check for supplies on behalf of Slow Food Miami! We are grateful to Slow Food Miami for supporting the garden. The third garden bed will be installed in November!

We are also grateful for a grant from Les Dames D'Escoffier International, which will enable us to buy a much-needed shed and other supplies for the garden!

A little over 6 weeks after the garden was seeded and planted, we now have Genovese basil, lime basil, chard, mesclun, collards, yellow squash and cucumbers! Ms. Brisuela's 2nd grade class harvested basil and made pesto (which 28 out of 30 children ate happily!), and Chef Cindy Hill will incorporate some of our bounty into her cooking class this week. To spread the love, organic veggie style, some produce will be bagged and sold on the cheap at the PTA's Pumpkin Patch this week.

While the garden is prospering, it hasn't been all roses: we lost one papaya tree to the school groundskeeper's lawnmower, and a few sunflower seedlings to the same lawnmower, and a caterpillar infestation ate most of the beans. But, we're learning quickly from our mistakes: The caterpillars we found eating the beans were relocated into habitats, which were distributed among teachers. And the Smoothie Garden and Sunflower garden will undergo changes in November, which will eradicate the need for lawnmowers to graze nearby.

Our garden signs are also a work in progress. They were re-varnished last week and will be slowly incorporated back into the beds.

On the compost side of things, Ms. Brisuela’s class has begun adding lunch scraps to our outdoor composters and Ms. Arsenault’s class is hosting a 5-tier worm hut. Lanette Sobel, from Fertile Earth, donated some worm tea to the garden, which has kept our plants (if not our volunteers) very happy.

Students continue to circle the garden before and after school and at recess. After witnessing the cucumbers this morning, my first grader said, “I can’t believe we’re actually growing things!”

Coming up next: Save the Date for more digging on 11/12, sheds r us, fence/don't fence it in.

Bamboo

Bamboo guru and artist, Brad Hallock, came to the garden today to install cool bamboo teepees and temple-entrance-like trellises for our vines to climb and heavier plants to grow against. Where art meets function, please stop by the garden to see this latest installation. (See slideshow for more pics.) Also, if you look under some leaves, you’ll find baby squash and baby cucs – just as cute as anything. Watch the stems though, they’re prickly – and we’re reminded that Mother Nature is at once a fierce protector and provider.

Signs and Worms!

Please stop by the garden to see the signs created by SPE students. They add color, life and the children's touch to our growing garden! Mr. Balzano's class also began a sunflower garden by the school store this week. Please stop by to wish it well.

Also, please join us for a WORM WORKSHOP, presented by the SPE PTA and the Save the Planet Club: this THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8TH AT 3PM AT SPE MEDIA CENTER: Led by Lannete Sobel from the Fertile Earth Foundation, SPE children will learn about the importance of worms and worm composting in the garden. In the hands‐on workshop, Ms. Sobel will help the children build a worm box for the SPE Organic Edible Garden. Children will be able to ask all their questions about these incredible forgotten little creatures that are so important for us all! FREE! ALL GRADES AND AGES WELCOME!