For the fifth year in a row, Labor Day comes and we set to work in our schoolyard gardens. As tradition has it, the past few years, these beginnings start with undergraduate volunteers early in the morning, attending a meeting about teaching and farming.
This year we began with the story of the Lakewood Garden (since we started here) and shared with a new class of students the story of our origins and some of the vision that has grown out of that original experiment.
Volunteers learned about huegelkultur and compost and pineapples and natives and soon their brains were swimming with plant names and growing strategies that they could only barely imagine.
As is tradition, we began pulling the endless growth of sedge, torpedo grass, that loves our beds and seeks every piece of open ground.
This year we began a new tradition, as well. I had student volunteers each take a starter pot and fill it to the top with dirt.
Back at the shaded picnic table, volunteers had their selection of seeds and each of them chose something to plant, encouraged to read the instruction on the seed packet and place only one seed in the hole. We watered the starter pots and everyone took one home.
Each volunteer is charged with tending to their seeds until next week, when they will bring them back to garden for our second meeting. How many will sprout? We wait.
As always, I am deeply grateful for the ongoing support of this program by community and college volunteers and, this semester, including the course being taught by Dr. Erika Spohrer at Eckerd College.
The growing season is upon us.
Kip Curtis
Founder and Executive Director
The Edible Peace Patch Project
