The Sunrise Garden continues to flourish and yield a great harvest of our cold weather crops this winter! We are so fortunate to live in a climate where we have this outdoor experiential “science lab” for growing food when other parts of the country are buried in snow.
Students from all grade levels gather every Tuesday with excitement and enthusiasm to learn gardening skills, taste vegetables and herbs, tend to our composting worms, and interact in nature. Some veggie first-timers who have never tasted some of the vegetables they have now grown from seed exclaim, “Wow, that’s delicious!” when eating buttercrunch lettuce, broccolini, or radishes! The garden space is also buzzing with some friendly pollinators, as our wildflowers and other pollinating plants have begun to bloom.
You may have noticed the colorful Sunrise Spirit flowers in the front area of the school, if you attended the Chinese New Year Festival or other school events. Young gardeners planted and mulched 48 red and pink geraniums in the three square beds just inside the front gate. Although some of the blossoms got a touch of frostbite at the end of January, we didn’t have any significant casualties of plant life for the flowers or in the garden, even amid a couple weeks of touch-and-go freezing in the 20’s some nights! Special thanks to our third grade students for keeping the geraniums watered, as these areas are not set up for automatic irrigation.
Now that we are halfway through the school year, we are beginning our spring planting with an indoor acceleration growing area. This will speed up germination and growth of tomatoes, zucchini, and crook-neck yellow squash to ensure students can harvest before school lets out in May. Many spring/summer crops take 70 or more days from seed planting until harvest, so working with 49-57 day crops, the students have estimated harvesting as early as March and April. In only two days, some of the seeds began sprouting, and the small indoor greenhouse setup is a new, fun space for students to check in on spring crops while we continue to harvest peas, broccoli, purple cauliflower, kale, radishes, dill, chard, and lettuce. The carrots, beets, onions & garlic have grown slowly this year but are coming along nicely, and students got to sample baby carrots and beets this past week at a vegetable tasting table.
All age levels of Garden Club participants can now distinguish between seed vegetables, root vegetables, leaf vegetables, stem vegetables, and flower vegetables. When you find a ziploc of veggie goodies in your child’s backpack on Tuesday afternoons, please talk to them about what they harvested & help them wash & prepare a salad, stir fry, or veggie tray to sample the fruits of their labor. (Warning: they might be so proud of their hard work, they are reluctant to share their goodies!) Gardening not only weaves science, math and sometimes social skills together but is also a basic life skill that humans have relied on for sustenance throughout history. It is exciting to learn how to grow food in the Arizona climate, and parents are welcome to join in too!
If you would like to participate in Garden Club as a volunteer (no experience required), between 11am-1pm on Tuesdays, please email our Gardening Coordinator, Nkechi at: nkechidiallo@gmail.com or text: 509.879.7639.
