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School Container Gardening

February 6, 2018 by Dustin Bajer

School Container Garden

Create A School Garden With Containers

One of the most significant challenges of urban agriculture in the classroom is finding a large permanent space. But what if there was a solution that means that your area need not be large or permanent? One of the easiest ways to introduce urban agriculture and gardening in the classroom is with containers. Small, attractive, and portable, container gardening might be the perfect way to gets your hands dirty without breaking the bank or going all-in with a fixed garden site.

What to Grow?

What you grow is entirely up to you and your class. With the right container, soil, water, and lighting, you can grow a staggering variety of plants.

Herbs and Leafy Green

When it comes to growing food in containers, herbs and leafy greens like basil, mint, rosemary, lettuce, and spinach are good choices. If possible, choose long-lived perennial varieties that you can harvest on an ongoing basis. Before deciding which plants you want to grow, consider how you might use them as a class or school.

Fruiting Plants

If you have larger containers and lots of light, consider fruiting plants like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, peas, and beans. With even larger containers consider small trees or shrubs like citrus or figs.

Growing Figs in Containers

Growing Figs in containers – StarkBros.com

Choosing Soil For Your Container Garden

Choosing suitable soil for your container is probably the most critical step. Though, you might be tempted to grab a few shovel scoops of soil from the garden resist the urge. While garden soil works well in the backyard it’s a terrible choice for containers; more often than not it will pack into a tight brick and be utterly unusable.

Technically speaking soil is composed of organic matter, water, air, and inorganic minerals such as sand, clay, or silt. It’s these inorganic minerals that tend to compact and make garden soil a poor potting mix. Instead, choose a soilless potting mix. While soilless potting mixes are chalked full of organic matter, water, and air, they lack the inorganic minerals found in actual soil; hence the term “soilless”. However, with more room for water and air, soilless mixes are lighter, stay fluffy (filled with air), and don’t easily compact.

Watering Your Container Garden

While each variety of plant has its preference for moisture, the key to a healthy container garden is to find a happy medium between soggy soil and bone dry. Generally speaking, your growing medium should be slightly damp to the touch but not wet. If you could grab a handful of soil, squeeze it, and get a single drop of water, you’ve got it right.

How frequently you water will depend on the size of your pot, its location, and the plant you’re growing (some plants, like tomatoes, are thirsty and won’t tolerate drying out).

To prevent overwatering, use containers with drainage holes at their base. While you can get around a lack of drainage holes by adding stones (or some other porous medium) to the bottom of your containers your plants will be better off if excess moisture can freely drain through the bottom. Remember that air is a critical component of healthy soil and that over-watering removed air to the point that the plant’s roots will be unable to breathe.

Lighting Your Container Garden

Like water, each plant has its preference for how much light it wants. While tomatoes and peppers love the sun other crops like lettuce, spinach, and broccoli are more shade tolerant. Depending on the location of your container and what you’re growing, you may get away with a sunny South-facing window or need to supplement your crop with full-spectrum artificial lighting (such as these sunblaster compact fluorescents or T5s.

Choosing The Right Container For The Job

Typical, Off the Shelf, Pots

There’s nothing standard about an off the shelf pot as each pot is sure to vary in height, depth, shape, size, and material. Plastic containers are inexpensive and light but not as durable. In contrast, ceramic pots can be expensive and bulky. The best pot for a school is probably a free pot so talk to colleagues, big-box stores, and nurseries to see if you can take any old containers they might have laying around. Plastic nursery pots inexpensive, pleasant to work with, and a good choice for school; they’re not pretty, but they’re durable and in abundance.

Self-Watering Pots

A self-watering pot is exactly what it sounds like – a pot that waters itself. Though not foolproof, self-watering containers generally have a water reservoir below the soil and a wick to draw water into the container as the soil requires it. Any form or self-watering pot or automatic watering technique is valuable for schools because it answers the existential questions of “who will take care of the plants over the weekend or break?” You can sometimes find self-watering pots at garden supply stores, though, they’re not as common.

Earthboxes Containers

Strawberries In An Earthbox

Strawberries growing in an Earthbox container garden.

An Earthbox is a complete gardening kit and commonly used by the Sustinable Food Edmonton’s Little Green Thumbs Program to grow vegetables and herbs in hundreds of school classrooms. The basic Earthbox kit consists of a self-watering grow box, casters (for easy transport), and an organic soil amendment (fertilisers and minerals). You can purchase lights as an accessory.

Earthboxes provide roughly two square feet of growing space on top of a self-watering reservoir; keep the water reservoir topped up, and the innovative Earthbox design wicks up water when needed. I can say from personal experience that growing in Earthboxes is an easy and efficient way to start growing food in the classroom. The only downside of Earthboxes is that they are one of the more expensive options.

Global Buckets

Rooftop Global Buckets

Melons growing in a rooftop global bucket garden.

For the DIY class and teacher, making Global Buckets might be the perfect option. The invention of two high school students looking for an inexpensive way to make Earthboxes, a Global Buckets is simply a bucket inside of another bucket. By adding a wick (cloth or soil filled pot) and a watering tube, you can build an inexpensive self-watering container for a fraction of the price of an Earthbox. Though, not at pretty, a Global Buckets are deep enough to root vegetables like potatoes or grow larger plants like small trees and shrubs.

Scaling Up Your School Container Garden

The great thing about a container garden is that it scales so effortlessly; you can start with one container and scale up (or down) as you see fit and as the school year progresses. However, should that day come that you’d like something more substantial and permanent, raised beds are a logical next step.

Raised Garden Beds

Simple raised beds made with 8 inch cedar.

Raised Beds

What is a raised bed if not a large pot? While a raised bed is large to be virtually immobile, they’re a logical next step for a classroom looking to scale up from or consolidate smaller container gardens. The trick to a successful raised bed on school property is finding a suitable site; ideally with plenty of sunlight, access to water, accessible to the students and staff, and relatively permanent (they’re difficult to move).

There are many off-the-shelf raised bed options or kits, though, if your school is fortunate enough to have an industrial arts class it might be possible to turn your raised bed into a fabrication project. A few things to consider; avoid using anything wider than two-arms-lengths or you’ll have to crawl into the garden to access vegetables growing in its centre (note: use your student’s arms as they’ll be the ones planting and harvesting), choose a light and fluffy soil or soilless mix. You don’t have to build it too deep, though, I’d recommend at least a foot. Organic matter helps retain moisture to the more you have in your soil, the better.

Self-Watering (Wicking) Beds

School Wicking Bed

Wicking bed; raised garden bed with water reservoir (hidden) under it.

If you built a raised bed on top of a source of water you’d have a wicking-bed. Wicking beds are large self-watering pots. While there are a lot of ways to achieve this, most wicking beds rely on creating a watertight reservoir, filling it with gravel, covering the gravel with landscape fabric, and building a typical raised bed on top. Like self-watering pots, wicking beds use the soil’s natural water-wicking action to soak up water as needed.

Wicking Beds

Installation of a wicking bed in a residential yard. In this example, perforated weeping tile pipe brings water from the roof to the raised beds where it can be absorbed by organic matter in the soil.

As a less technical alternative, I have used 4″ perforated pipe to bring water from the downspout of a building directly under your garden. I prefer this technique as it doesn’t require building a water-tight reservoir or moving heavy gravel.

There are some excellent online resources for both of these wicking bed techniques.

To Sum Up

However you decide to do it, containers gardening is an excellent way to start growing food in the classroom. Use a light, soilless growing medium in inexpensive (or free) container, and you’ll be on your way! Start with a single pot and scale up as you find success.

 

Filed Under: Dustin Bajer's Articles Tagged With: Education, School Gardens, Sustainable Food Edmonton, Urban Agriculture

The Trouble With School Gardens

February 23, 2017 by Dustin Bajer

The Challenges of School Gardens And Sustainable Food Edmonton’s Plan To Fix Them

Students plant perennials in a school garden in Edmonton, Alberta.

Students plant perennials in a school garden in Edmonton, Alberta.

Recent years have also seen an increase in schools interested in urban agriculture initiatives – especially school gardens. Traditionally run as extra-curricular activities or horticulture classes, school gardens are gaining traction in and around Edmonton. Not just nice to have, school gardens are tools for differentiated instruction, improving problem-solving, and cross-curricular learning. However, it’s not smooth sailing. As much as many of us would like to see a garden in every school, there are a lot of challenges. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Dustin Bajer's Articles Tagged With: Edmonton, School Gardens, Urban Agriculture, Wix

Sustainable Me Podcast

October 17, 2016 by Dustin Bajer

Sustainable Me: Learning From Nature and Schools As Ecosystems

The following is an edited transcript from the Sustainable Me Podcast recorded in the summer of 2016. Over the course of twelve and a half minutes, we touch on permaculture, biophilic design, and an ecological approach to education. Sustainable Me is a web/video series and podcast that explores sustainability in the province of Alberta. For more on Sustainable Me, visit SustinableMeYEG.ca.

Edited Transcript 

My name is Dustin Bajer and I work on a variety of sustainable, urban agriculture, and biophilic projects. I’ve been teaching at Jasper Place High School and am passionate about project-based sustainability programming. Since 2010, we’ve put in a couple food forests in at the school, built an aquaponic system, living walls, and have raised tilapia. It’s been a fantastic adventure; exploring all these topics with students and trying to grow food at the same time.

On Learning From Nature
Gardening was something that my parents were into. I hated it. It was work. You’d come home from school and have to weed the garden. When I wasn’t reluctantly gardening, I was running around the forest building forts. I think that was a formative time for me. I didn’t realize it at the time but in hindsight I was observing two parallel systems. The fist was a garden. It was a lot of work. You’re out there weeding, tilling and making sure that there aren’t any pests. Then you’ve got a forest (literally across the road). Nobody watered or tilled it. Nobody weeded it. The whole thing struck me as odd. Two systems both growing things. Why was one so much more work than the other? What is it about a conventional garden that makes it so much work and what is it about a forest that allows it to manage itself? Can we apply the lessons from nature into human-built systems? Whether a garden bed, an education system or a food system, what kinds of lessons can we draw from the natural world and apply to the built one? These early memories really shaped my thinking later on in life and I ultimately came to view sustainability as a design problem with nature as the perfect toolkit.

On Education And The Benefit Of Project-Based Learning
Right off the bat, the education system has to exclude a lot of interesting stuff. Things that could make a real difference in the life of a student who hasn’t found their thing yet. It’s not out of malice. There are only so many hours in the day so something has to give. It’s the unfortunate reality. Then we teach this narrow subset knowledge in a very linear way. Kids go to class, the bell rings, they move to the next class. It’s a very industrial model. It simplifies and compartmentalizing knowledge but fails to show how knowledge can bridge disciplines. Students can’t easily transfer knowledge and skills out of context. Setting up our discrete subjects is artificial. I wish we could depend more on projects. Project are inherently cross-curricular. If you’re building an aquaponic system you can say it’s a biology but we can also talk about food security, animal husbandry, and plant science. We can create a users manual so now we’re developing communications skills and design. Projects inevitably touch on a variety of outcomes.

Schools As Ecosystems
A forest is stable because of its connections and relationships. It’s a mess but it’s very resilient mess. You can cut connections in the forest but the forest stays intact. Forests, like brains, are networks. If a forest taught a lesson it would consciously link each skill to as many other concepts and disciplines as possible. It’s this network, this jumble of information that makes concepts stick. If you learn about and use the quadratic equation in math class and physics class and social studies the more relevant and useful it becomes. If you can tie meaning to it from multiple disciplines then that become a resilient idea in the mind of the learner. The only way that I really know how to tackle that is through projects. I want to garden like an eco-system. I want to teach like an eco-system.

On School Food Security
At Jasper Place High School, one in five students come to school hungry. Provincially it’s sometime like 1 in 7. And there’s a lot of different reasons for that; a lack of skills, finances, transportation, cultural capital, etc.

I’ve been the most interested in growing food with students (especially if we can grow food like an eco-system). Though, in 2015, we received funding from Breakfast For Learning (supported by Loblaws) to create and run a breakfast program. Each morning, students would convene in the kitchen, take raw ingredients, and make free breakfast for students. What’s great is that we’re also working on food literacy. Students are learning about safety and hygiene, food prep, and sanitization. They’ll be able to take those skills home with them.

On The Future (Of Everything)
I’m pretty optimistic about the future. I believe that we can work with the natural world in ways that benefit it and ourselves. There’s a dangerous cultural narrative that humans are bad and only making things worse. You hear kids talking about how the planet would be better off if people disappeared. It’s unfortunate to hear. People can do some pretty amazing things. Food in schools has been a really good context for me to explore our relationship to the natural world. Everybody eats. And if you can grow food in a way that benefits the natural world that’s pretty inspiring. In an ideal world, we’d flip the narrative and see ourselves as forces for/of nature. That future looks so much brighter to me.

I can’t help but think that an education system that embraced the natural world would inherently be modeled after aspects of it. If schools worked more like forests we could creates abundance. That’s sustainable and inherently more interesting to me.

End Edited Transcript

For more about the ideas above, I’ve included Sustinable Me – Epidode 5 – Econo-Me.

Filed Under: Dustin Bajer's Articles Tagged With: Biophilic Design, Education, School Gardens

5 Ways School Gardens Support Learning

February 22, 2014 by Dustin Bajer 2 Comments

A Garden In Every School

School composting. Student build compost piles at the Jasper Place High School school garden.

Student builds compost piles at the Jasper Place High School school garden.

Every schoolyard should have a garden. School gardens produce food, connect kids to nature, and support an active lifestyle. Unfortunately, we tend to overlook many pedagogical reasons for school gardens – could it be that they’re good for education?

Since 2010, I have been working with students on various urban agriculture initiatives and have seen first hand how school gardens support learning.
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Dustin Bajer's Articles Tagged With: Education, School Gardens

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Dustin Bajer

Teacher, permaculture designer, master gardener, hobby beekeeper, consultant, and network nerd living in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Read More

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