Garden Liaison's, What can you do ?

Now that we have the K-2 Garden mostly planted, we have come up with a simple maintenance schedule to ensure that all the baby plants and seedlings have all the nourishment they need to prosper. After consulting our Teachers we have come up with these days for weekly watering that the children can be a part of.

Monday is Miss Jen's First Grade Class
Tuesday is Miss Karen's Second Grade Class
Wednesday is Miss Morgan's Kindergarten Class
Thursday is Mr. V and Miss Kate's Multi Age Class
Friday is Jacob's Kindergarten Class

On these days the Teachers will bring their children out to do a bit of watering...mainly just the seedlings and the passion vines...and to throw out compost scraps and feed the worms. This is really just an opportunity for the Teachers to do a bit of gardening with the kids. This doesn't need to take more than 15 minutes unless they are in the mood for more!!

The rest of the watering for that day will be up to the Garden Liaisons to either do themselves, or coordinate a parent volunteer to spend about 40 minutes on your classrooms day tending to the garden. We will have a weekly calender on the white board in the garden that will list the daily chores. The chores will mostly be watering and everyone's favorite job, weeding. I am sure the children would love to pull weeds as well. Everyone will need to know the combination to the locked bench with the water key in it...and how to work that thing!! Amy will be in the Garden, this Wednesday and Friday after school to go over all the details, so please stop by. We do plan to incorporate some type of irrigation in the future, which will make watering a breeze.

So, if you are wondering what the overall responsibilities for a Garden Liaison will be, here's what we think...
A Garden Liaison will...

1) Find out how your child's teacher would like to integrate gardening into their plans for the year.

2) Choose a day of the week for classroom gardening projects and put up volunteer sign-ups for these jobs if the teacher wants help.

3) Put up a sign-up for parent volunteers for the once weekly maintenance...(for instance, water on Monday).

4) Keep an eye on the plants in your classes designated area...share information about the plants in your garden bed and pass it on to the kids.

5) Continue to check the Garden Blog for updates to pass onto teachers, parents, children, etc.

6) Keep classroom up-to-date about Garden Events via bulletin board or class newsletter and keep Garden Committee up-to-date about classroom garden interests as they evolve.

7) Encourage other activities with the help of parent volunteers involving the garden...sketching plants in the garden...cooking and eating...perhaps learning about medicinal herbs...look into stories or folklore involving certain plants. For a great resource for gardening lessons and activities click on this link here. This is also a link in the Education Bar in the upper left hand corner, Kids Gardening.

8) Keep track of watering cans and tools and return them to garden!

9) If this seems like a lot...you may decide to make it a two person job! Either way it will be a very enjoyable way to spend your volunteer hours.

We hope the garden will enhance the school experience, not take away volunteers from teachers in much needed areas...hopefully the position of Garden Liaison will help the Teachers, maybe provide them with more time for small groups, etc.


As always, suggestions are appreciated in the comment section!!