Green Gardening Club

For those of you who read this and live on the west coast, you already know that California has a school with a green gardening program to promote nutrition and healthful eating. This program was first enacted in 1995, and continues to this day, allowing students to learn what it takes to grow a garden through hands-on experience.

Although California might be leading the way, school gardens are popping up all over the country, and they are becoming so popular that even First Lady Michelle Obama is a committed advocate. To demonstrate her commitment, she and the kids from Bancroft school in Washington, DC, planted their own school garden at the White House.

The community that I live in has its very own school garden program, and there is no finer way to get the kids involved in gardening than letting them grow their own fruits and veggies. This promotes sustainability as well as energy savings, since growing your own food reduces carbon imprints by saving on fossil fuel costs through transportation.

If you have a school green gardening project in your community, encourage your kids to take an active part. If there is no school gardening program, get involved to develop one. A call to a school administrator and a small plot of either public property or donated land may be all it will take to start one up. If you show interest, interest from others in developing a program like this might just take off by itself and grow from there. You can even post signs around the school for volunteers, and except for weeding and watering after the initial planting, gardens don’t need much care.

Obviously, organic gardening would be the best, but interest must first be found before any other step is taken. Growing organic might even be a highlight to consider. Regular fertilizing methods can be compared to organic fertilizing methods, and taste tests can show the difference between organically grown and regularly grown. This could be a valuable learning experience all by itself, and growing a school garden organically is exactly the way Michelle Obama taught the students that worked with her.

If there is a school green gardening program, you can volunteer to help, and if there isn’t one, push a few buttons and start one up! School gardens are great tools for kids to learn about gardening, eating healthy, and saving energy, all the while pulling kids away from video games. Believe me, that first taste of a ripe pepper or a tomato from a school garden, and the smiles that goes with it, will be well worth it!