The Great Gardeners

By:

 This Natural Classroom Cornerstone began the first day of school, on August 26th, 2013. It takes a village to accomplish the task of sorting snack and lunch trash into sections. Our categories are compost it, recycle it, trash it, milk/juice cartons and stack it. This was a daily focus of our student leadership team, Zoe, Alicia, Abby, Emma, and Chelsea. We wanted to teach the students at our elementary school to sort their trash and in addition we have partnered with Agromin Composting to pick-up our wet waste and turn it into compost material. Our trash company, EJ Harrison, contacted us to be a part of their program, and we had our wet waste containers picked up three times a week. 

With this committment to the trash company we needed to make sure each day was a "clean sort" for our wet waste. This container was all the uneaten food, paper napkins, and compostable lunch trays. This needed the whole student leaderships participation and we made a schedule which included trash helpers at each snack and lunch times. We also included students in the first-third grade who "volunteered" to help their classmates sort their trash.

This became successful and we were seeing results in our sorting station. The student leadership wanted to follow our trash to see where our wet waste goes, and how Agromin composts our discarded food. The "story of our trash" video was made, and we were so impressed with the process, and the end result being compost for gardens and other landscaping ventures.

We also used this wet waste to feed our earth worms in our school garden. Each Wednesday the trash sort team would collect uneated food and bring it to the garden and feed the worms in the worm bin. This process was done like clockwork each week and we realized that we had a lot of worm casings in our bin. Lori Hamor, a weekly garden member and the executive director of our "Food for Thought" program, suggested we sell the worm casings. We discovered that these worm casings were being sold in garden stores and we could sell ours at Open House. Lori bought packaging, we made labels, and put a recipe on the back, and our "worm compost tea" was ready. We packaged 34 cups of casings, and sold about half at our Open House for $5.00 each. This was a great way to raise funds for various school projects!

We also sold citrus snow cones at Open House. We live in a valley with many citrus trees, ranches, and orchards. We made some samples at our student leadership meeting and realized they were delicious! We asked a former parent, who has a ranch, to donate oranges. He was happy to do it, and donated 240 oranges. We borrowed a snow cone machine from a local church. A booth was set up, and we sold 250 snow cones!

Our final goal of eating food from our garden at lunch continues to be a focus. The school and local farmers are moving closer to making this happen. We now are involved in the "Harvest of the Month" program and this is a good step towards our garden to table concept. The district highlights a fruit and vegetable a month, delivers local produce that they have harvested, and they give samples to the students at lunch and snack. This is a wonderful way to expose students to new tastes and hopefully further the process of eating healthy, nutritious food from the garden. "Food for Thought" is a key component of this success.

This group accomplished many goals toward this cornerstone and we are very proud of our Natural Classroom cornerstone.