Indoor Seed Starter Station For School Learning Garden

My Students

My enthusiastic elementary students have grown, harvested, and eaten fresh vegetables from our School Learning Garden. They are blossoming and so are their plants. One of our biggest challenge is purchasing seedlings each year. We want to become more knowledgeable and self-sustaining gardeners.

Laburnum is a Title 1 school with up to 80% of our students on free or reduced lunch.

Many of our students live in public housing and do not have access to gardening or even a yard to play in. Although their resources are limited, my students love for learning and enthusiasm is not. They come to school each day ready to learn. This project has been really exciting for our students and has created engagement and unity between staff, parents, and community members. Through our garden project, we have recycled thousands of bottlecaps from the trash making murals for our garden out of them, empowered students and families by teaching them how to use hand tools, and given high school tech students the opportunity to make their class projects real through building us benches and a new patio for the garden area. Not to mention, our students and parents have had three full harvests, we've started a vermiculite compost area, and we are conserving rain water. Our students want to do more and more!

My Project

Imagine my art room-a place where creativity happens all the time. Now look out our big windows and see that creativity expand into our garden where veggies grow in raised beds, colorful murals hang, and composting and water-saving happens. Excited students want to grow, harvest, and eat fresh vegetables. As we are already learning to conserve water and recycle our soil, I also want my students to learn how to seed-save from the previous year, germinate and start their own plants from seeds. Working in a garden or an indoor garden, like the one I am trying to create with my Indoor Seed Starting Station, will help my students experience the satisfaction and pride that occurs from taking care of something over time, all while observing the life cycle and teaching environmental awareness. This will help us save money in the long run because we will not have to buy seeds each year and my students will learn more about the growing process by watching and nurturing young seedlings.

Any donations to this project will improve our garden project by helping to expand the outdoor garden into an indoor garden during cold winter months and during the early spring.

By donating to my classroom's Indoor Seed Starting Station, students will foster and practice life skills like responsibility, observation, and communication. They will get a real hands-on-experience with the Life Cycle, and it will extend their connections with what they are learning in their Science classes.