There’s something bittersweet about covering Schoolyard Garden beds at the end of the fall into winter season. The Schoolyard Gardens team uses landscape fabric or burlap to cover garden beds after they’ve been cleared of garden debris to ensure that they’ll be ready for planting come springtime. The fabric suppresses any pesky weeds that inevitably […]
Schoolyard Garden Spotlight: Southwood Elementary Garden Club
Did you know that sweet potatoes are the most sensitive vegetable to freezing temperatures? If left outside in the cold the tubers become mealy and inedible. On the day Southwood Elementary planned to harvest their sweet potatoes, they were very aware that they only had a small window of time before that evenings freezing temperature […]
A Beautiful Night in the Gardens
Kansas City Community Garden’s annual fundraiser, Gardens at Sunset, is a night when friends of KCCG gather in the beautiful Beanstalk Children’s Garden and show their support in both the silent and live auctions. As our biggest fundraiser of the year, these donations will help plant orchards for neighborhoods, build gardens for schools and provide […]
Spotlight: Summer at Barstow—Farmer’s Market
Last week I had the chance to visit The Barstow School. Students attending the Summer at Barstow had the chance to participate in the Barstow Farmer’s Market class again this year. Sarah Holmes, a 7th grade science as well as AP Science teacher, and the Director of School Gardens, leads this class during the […]
How to Water Your Schoolyard Garden
Quick, pop quiz! It lightly showered for an hour yesterday, do you need to water your garden today? Is it enough to water each garden bed for 2 minutes, 3 times per week? The answers are YES, you still need to water your garden even if it lightly showered for an hour yesterday, and NO, […]
Not-So-Obvious Lessons from Gardening
These past couple weeks have been a crazy whirlwind of traveling to schools all over the city to deliver plants and seeds and assist teachers and students with planting their schoolyard gardens. Tiring? Yes! But, so much fun and incredibly inspiring! I love the obvious aspects of a planting season – being in the […]
How to Plant Your Schoolyard Garden!
Hopefully, nobody lost sleep over the threat of frost this weekend! Saturday’s snow was a harmless, wet snow that didn’t accumulate too much. If you haven’t planted your garden, be sure to get planting this week to ensure a harvest or two before school’s out for the summer. Read these tips to help you […]
Fresh Ideas from School Garden Support Conference!
A few weeks ago, Crystal and I had the opportunity to attend a week long conference in Santa Cruz, California. The School Garden Support Organization Leadership Institute was hosted by LifeLabs and one of our generous supporters, the Whole Kids Foundation. Over the course of the week we had the chance to network with […]
We’re Building New Schoolyard Gardens!
One common question we get at SYG is, “what do you do during the wintertime?” Since it’s too cold to garden, you might think all we do is drink hot chocolate and eat soup, but you’d be wrong (though we do a lot of that too)! Actually, we’re busy building new school gardens (among […]
Schoolyard Gardens Welcomes Taylor!
Hello everyone! My name is Taylor and I am the new Missouri Healthy Foods AmeriCorps member serving with Schoolyard Gardens here at KCCG. I started volunteering with Schoolyard Gardens a few months ago and I enjoyed my time with kids in the garden so much that when this position popped up, I had to jump on […]