School Garden Summer News

[Amy Joens]

Greetings, Gardeners!

We hope the sunny and rainy summer has been treating you and your gardens well. We've been in lots of gardens in the past month, and so many of your garden spaces look tremendous! It's always a joy to see the creative ideas, bountiful harvests, and small, dirty hands curiously digging in the soil. Please read on for some important news, events and updates regarding school gardens in Des Moines! 

Farm and Garden Curriculum Sifting Party

You are invited to come out to a Farm and Garden Curriculum meeting! We will plan to meet for 2-3 hours to sift through garden curriculum and Des Moines Public Schools science standards, matching one with the other. Please bring a charged laptop and any charts of units you are interested in covering. It is our goal to complete this project by August 1, 2015. Said curriculum and resources will be accessible on the district's unit planning webpage and made available to teachers for the 2015-2016 school year. 

 

Monday, July 6th at 1-3:30pm

Cherry Glen Learning Farm, 3989 NW 94th Ave., Polk City

(Ray Meylor's property near Ankeny)  

This is sure to be a fun and productive meeting! We will prepare brick-oven pizza and tour Ray's intricate educational farm. We hope you can make it! Please contact us with any questions or ideas. Also, feel free to extend the invite to anyone else who you think should be at this meeting. Please respond to chelse...@foodcorps.org if you plan on attending.

School Garden Tours

We'd like some of your lovely school gardens to host tours this summer. Hopefully, if interest allows, these will continue on into the fall as school begins as well. We will start with tours at the following schools:

Tuesday, July 7, 5:00 pm, Hillis Elementary- 2401 56th St. Des Moines

Tuesday, July 14, 4:00 pm, Moulton Elementary- 1541 8th St. Des Moines

These will be very informal events- stop by the garden to chat with the garden leaders, see the setup and design, and share some ideas and best practices! 

Are you interested in hosting one of these? Let us know of a date or time you and your garden would be available to host one of these events. We will be sharing with Master Gardeners and other groups and organizations as well who may be interested in attending. 

Garden Harvest Tracking

Are you keeping track of your garden harvest in pounds? If not, you should! Eat Greater Des Moines is trying to track the impact of school, community, and faith-based gardens in Des Moines and needs our help. Click here for the link to the editable spreadsheet where you can input your pounds of produce harvested from your garden as well as volunteer hours spent in your garden. For more information, contact aalvarez@eatgreaterdesmoines.org. 

Keep at it! This is the time for your garden to shine and all your hard work off season to be realized. You are making great impacts- more than you can see! 

Sunny Smiles, 

Amy Joens and Chelsea Krist

Des Moines FoodCorps 

[Amy Joens]

Hi all! 

A reminder that Hillis' Garden Tour is happening tonight! See you there at 5:00 pm. 

Tuesday, July 7, 5:00 pm, Hillis Elementary- 2401 56th St. Des Moines

Best, 

Amy and Chelsea