In 2016, after moving to central Ohio with her family, Amber Keller was at a Granby Elementary SchoolPTA meeting when she proposed the idea of a garden behind the building.
“Everybody there was excited,” Keller said. “I took a proposal to (Granby principalPatti Schlaegel)of a process that we might use to design and install the garden, and she was on board.”
Keller – a Franklin County Master Gardener whose two children attended Worthington Schools' Granby at the time – as well as other volunteers began working with the school's grounds-maintenance crew to beginbuilding the Granby School Garden.
The group also gauged the input of staff and students about what they would want in a garden and how they would use it.
“Our goal was to get input from all of our stakeholders so that they could have ownership of the spaceand that we were also creating a space that would be useful to them for learning,” Keller said.
The approximately 7,500-square-foot garden cost $37,000, Keller said. She said $11,440 was secured throughgrants from the Worthington Education Foundation, the Scotts Miracle-Gro Foundation, Finley's Smile Foundation, Franklin County Community Gardens and the GPD Group Employees' Foundation, and the remainder was funded through the Columbus Foundation's online fundraising event the Big Give, the Granby PTAand donations from local businesses.
The garden has been growing for approximately threeyears now, and those involved say it has become a beloved feature of the school.
“It’s been such a value added to our building and our educational program,” Schlaegel said.
“That was our main goal, to give kids an opportunity for authentic learning experiences to practice critical thinking and problem solving,” Keller said. “And the garden is a really great place for social-emotional learning.”
Keller said Emily Hunt, a landscape architect with the Warner Larson Landscape Architects firm in Boston and a family friend of garden volunteer Heidi Schaeffer, designed the garden pro bono. Keller said Schaeffer andKaryn Nicoll are two volunteers who havebeen instrumental to the project since the beginning.
The garden features eight raised cedar beds that are elevated so gardeners can use the kind of soil they want and amend it for the best growing conditions, Keller said. A variety of vegetables are grown in these beds, including cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplants and radishes.
Keller said another space has been carved out of what used to be grass through "the lasagna method" –a process of smothering grass with cardboard and layering a variety of organic materials on top to make a growing space. This is an environmentally friendly method of preparing a garden because it does not involve the use of herbicides, shesaid.
That space has been seeded with native wildflower seeds and grasses, Keller said, and gardeners also created a butterfly habitat with species native to Ohio. It is called theFinley's Smile Butterfly Habitat.
Other features include a space for bird houses and a compost area. Two walking paths span the length of the garden, with a circular outdoor seating area in the middle and a pavilion next to it.
"It started as just a few raised beds, and now it's a wonderful space for learning," Granby second-grade teacher Paula Averesch said. "And then there's the outdoor classroom that can be used for garden activities or other activities. It's just a wonderful space to have at our school that I hope to use again this year as we're getting back to normal."
Granby students and staff members and a network of about 150 volunteers have taken ownership of the garden, Keller said, and it'salmost entirely maintained through the work of these groups.
Parents sign up to take turns watering and harvesting the garden over the summer, she said.
Keller said the garden also is a Franklin County-approved Master Garden, and Franklin County Master Gardeners occasionally will come to help with tasks.
The Master Gardener program is a national program overseen by the Extension Master Gardener organization and administered through participating extensions at local land-grant universities. Master Gardeners are volunteers who have received 75 hours of horticulture training and volunteered 50 hours on gardening projects. In central Ohio, the program is overseen by Ohio State University through the OSU Extension.
Granby also has “garden recesses” during the school year, during which parent-volunteers staff the garden and students may help water, pull weeds, check out the insects they find, harvest vegetablesand tend to the compost pile, among other gardening tasks.
“Our goal has always been to involve our school community as much as possible in this process so they have ownership of the space and want to help take care of it,” Keller said.
Keller said she and the other volunteers originally envisioned the garden as a teaching tool. Instruction-wise, thegarden is utilized primarily in the natural sciences at Granby, she said, but programming in all subjects has incorporated the garden in some way.
“Teachers are able to take their kids outside and do all sorts of lessons about growing things, the life cycle, insects, soil sampling, all sorts of different things,” Schlaegel said.
Granby fifth-grade teacherTinaSwearengin said she has used the garden in every subject area with her students.It wasn't really implemented for instruction last school yearbecause classes couldn't have volunteers with them because of theCOVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, butSwearengin said when Granby students were in the building, they would ask to frequentthe garden duringrecess.
"Some would go over to read, others wanted to go in and look for different plants that were growing, see if they could find any produce growing, while others were looking for bugs – looking to see who was living in the garden,"Swearengin said. "For each kid, it was a different experience."
“One of the things we’ve heard in the garden several times is, ‘My favorite thing about school is the garden,'" Kellersaid. “At garden recess, there’s always kids coming over to water and just to marvel at all the things they can find. They’re really engaged in the garden, which is fun to see.”
sborgna@thisweeknews.com
@ThisWeekSteve
