Help me give my students an Earthwise shredder/chipper and organic soil to help them learn how carbon sequestration improves soil quality, makes the garden more productive, offset greenhouse gases, and helps to slow down climate change.
$553 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
My students attend a small autonomous public Title I school in Oakland, CA, designed to foster student success through experiential learning and an extensive internship program. As the garden steward and garden-ecology internship mentor, I work with students and interns so they can gain valuable hands-on experience in the following areas: horticulture, garden/plant nursery maintenance, propagation, composting, attracting pollinators, and good land stewardship.
Through our gardening programs, students and interns (who mostly live in food deserts) learn how to grow and eat organic fruits and veggies to improve their nutritional status and to improve food equity.
Further, their time our therapeutic garden improves their social and mental well-being. Our student population is diverse, consisting of 50% Latino, 30% African American, 7% White, and 13% Asian American. Over 75% of the school's students qualify for free and/or reduced-price lunch.
The garden-ecology internship not only provides an authentic environment and audience for our students' work, it also creates an opportunity for our students to form healthy, meaningful relationships, develop a deep life-long connection with nature, and learn how to be good land stewards.
My Project
My project involves introducing carbon gardening to my students in order to teach them how excess carbon can be removed from the earth's atmosphere and be stored in the soil where carbon will facilitate plant growth, especially in our veggie garden. Carbon gardening involves implementing carbon-friendly gardening practices such as adding shredded leaves to the natural soil, no-till or conservation tilling for minimal soil disturbance, cardboard sheet mulching, applying wood chips, composting, and using cover crops as ways of sequestering carbon into the soil.
Because soil contains 10 times the amount of carbon than is in the atmosphere, carbon gardening is a potential solution so slow down climate change.
In summary, by acquiring a shredder/chipper, worm castings as well organic garden soil, I will be able to teach students how adding organic matter back into the garden’s soil will 1) improve the quality of the natural soil, 2) make the garden more productive, 3) help offset greenhouse gases, 4) aid in sequestering carbon back into the soil, 5) speed up the composting process, and 6) show in a real way how we are doing our part to slow down climate change.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Rivera and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
