Work Party, May 5th, Everyone welcome!

Time to get dirty! Families, let’s get together and have a work party!

Saturday May 5th, 10am-1pm

(Rain date Sunday May 6th, same time)

Meet at the garden. Bring your shovels, rakes, wheelbarrows and electric drill if you have ’em, we’ll be building more boxes.

Get involved and help with:

-building 4 more wooden boxes and filling with soil

-painting identification signs for the garden

-bring out the water barrels and setting up a new platform

-winter clean out of beds and school grounds

-early planting of peas

-set up trellis for runner bean tunnel

Pass this along to any community members, grandparents, friends that might be interesed in helping with the school’s garden. You do not have to have experience with gardening. Leave a comment here or contact Crystal Pelly elly@hrsb.ns.ca if you have any questions or suggestions. See you Saturday!

Get involved!

All ISES families are invited to get involved in the school’s community garden. We need novices and experts to help plan, design and dig this sophomore year’s garden project. No experience is necessary! Getting involved is a great way to learn basic gardening skills with your school community.

If you missed tonight’s garden planning meeting, here are the goals set for the 2012 growing season:

-Build four more garden boxes (one with a plexiglass greenhouse for later harvests

-Implement more rain barrels for watering

-Plant more produce that is harvested later in year (squash, potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, herbs)

-Work towards getting families to use and eat the food the children are growing, reach out to community groups who could make use of the food

-Better signage on the garden so families can make better use of the produce through the summer.

-Making sure the children are kept involved in each step of the way, each grade will participate in starting the seeds inside and eventually planting the seedlings outdoors.

Also please consider donating the following items for the school garden: working garden hose, unused peat pots for seedlings and potting soil. If you are cleaning out the garage or see something at someone’s yard sale, please think of the Inglis Street Urban Garden. All donations can be dropped off at the office attention Ms. Pelly. Help us empower our children to learn where food comes from and how it grows. We are also hoping to have the use of a soil block mold for a few mornings the second week in April. If anyone has access to a soil block mold please contact Ms. Pelly at the school.

Watch for updates here for a work party date mid-May. During the work party we plan to build 4 additional boxes and clean up the school grounds along Robie Street. Already the benefits of last year’s work with bulbs starting to poke through.

 

Hello Spring! Let’s get gardening!

Happy first day of spring! There will be an open meeting for all parents interested in participating in this year’s school garden. The meeting will be held next  MONDAY, MARCH 26th, 7pm in the Inglis Street staff room. Everyone is invited, even if you don’t have a green thumb. We will be discussing what to plant, the plan to install 4 new boxes, grounds cleanup and fundraising.

Sue Comeau Stender and Crystal Pelly recently met with the School Ground Greening Consultant from the Evergreen foundation. The group is a “leading national funder and facilitator of local, sustainable greening projects in schoolyards, parks and communities across Canada.” Sue worked hard to deliver a grant application just before March break for funding for the garden. We should know soon if her hard work paid off.

Ms. Pelly has also been applying for school board and provincial grants that will give us the funding to build out more boxes to grow the footprint of the garden.

See you on Monday. If you can’t make it, leave a comment here and we’ll make sure we keep you up to date with what is happening in the garden. The tulips we planed in the fall are already making an appearance. What a week!

Sundays at 6pm

Hi,

First off, congrats to everyone for finishing another year of school! Here’s to sleeping in and no lunch making!

For garden maintenance we have decided to meet every  SUNDAY at 6pm, to help with the weeding, watering and thinning. Everyone is welcome. If you can make it one week and not the next, no worries, we just hope families stay involved through the summer to keep the garden! Jean Snow is willing to meet us the first Sunday, are people available to come this Sunday for training? If not, we can schedule Jean for the the following week.

The garden has also been assigned a community volunteer through the EAC. The volunteer will meet us Sundays at 6pm, so if no one shows up, then at least the garden is being tended.

There will be produce to harvest all through the summer so we need families to come by and help us eat it! Right now there is a LOT of lettuce, please come and help your self. Bring a bag and some scissors and snip away.

We also purchased rain barrel stands, so we’ll try to get them installed this week. We might cheat and fill them half way with the hose that Ms.Pelly installed out of the staff room so at least we have some water access on Sunday evenings as the school will be locked at this time.

I do have a blank sign that I finally made…just need to get it painted and then hammered in the ground….just like a seed this is a slow process to get everything done.

Also I wanted to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to Ms.Woodbury who was so supportive with the garden. I heard Ms. Woodbury made a salad with the school lettuce for the staff goodbye party! Hope it was delicious! Good luck at your new school, we’ll sure miss you at Inglis Street.