Garden
Our FOM-funded Micheltorena St. School and Community Garden cheers up our campus, promotes healthy eating, encourages environmental stewardship, and engages students in experiential learning.
Our weekly Garden Ranger Program from Enrich LA, provides students with interactive and interdisciplinary garden lessons. The Enrich LA Garden Ranger program ensures that students benefit from the presence of our edible school garden and that the garden is taken care of throughout the year. A trained garden ranger is consistently on site every week to care for the garden and to deliver straightforward and cheerful curriculum. Enrich LA supplies all of the materials, seedlings, amendments, teaching supplies and takes care of repairs.
The students have learned a lot in regards to maintaining the garden, focusing on irrigation needs, soil health and seed starting. The garden lessons include: soil health and soil identification, three sisters Native American growing methods, identifying friends and foes in our gardens and how symbiotic relationships are important in an organic garden. We have worked hard to foster a sense of ownership and pride. One of the many benefits of seeing kids grow their own food has been a curiosity to try new foods, empathy for creatures large and small, and a focus on enjoying our green spaces as they provide calmness in times when we need them most.
The kids have become responsible Jr. Garden Rangers, so much so, that they are composting their lunch time meals, implementing share tables and completing the cycle by composting their scraps and creating beautiful soil amendments.
If you'd like to see the Enrich LA blog you can just link to enrichla.org and that highlights all of LAUSD schools and has lots of great content.
We are grateful to the Micheltorena Community Garden co-founders, who helped create the garden in 2010. You can follow them here on Instagram.
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