Sustainable Gardening
Growing Your Own Food and Native Plants
Contributers: Sarah Sloane, Zealand Reynolds, and Etta Murray are Graduate students at UCSC working towards a Masters degree in Education and a multiple subject teaching credential. Collectively, we have created this blog post to assist teachers with implementing sustainability in the classroom. We feel that its important to educate students about the need to support our local communities as well as learning skills around food production and the ecological benefits of keeping native plants present in ecosystems.
Abstract: Teaching about sustainability and habits that promote sustainability is important for children of all ages. The sites we researched are specially geared towards garden education and the benefits of having a garden at school, native plant education and the benefits of planting natives to your area, and finally the local/organic movement and how important it is for our environment and our neighborhoods to support farmers who produce locally.
General resources from the web and brief descriptions:
For garden education: School gardens ensure hands on learning, environmental stewardship, and provides students with the experience of growing and eating food they produce.
- The North American Association for Environmental Education
The North American Association for Environmental Education has an entire archive of compiled environmental education and sustainability education resources. Some are very general but some are more directed towards school yard ecology, soils, etc. and has a bunch of interactive videos, and lesson plan suggestions and samples.
- Botanic Gardens Conservation International
This Canadian site offers a bunch of lessons meant to take place in the garden. They range from learning about numbers to learning about diversity in the garden setting. It could be a resource for all of the varying types of things other than gardening that can take place within a school or home garden.
- Ecoliteracy
Ecoliteracy has links to various sites including links to an ecological footprint calculator, various films (perhaps more adult appropriate), readings, etc.
- Ecoliteracy
Offers a lesson plan on resiliency for grades 9-12.
- Ecoliteracy
This site has a bunch of benefits of school gardens and tips for getting started and would be great as a teachers resource why attempting to justify planning a school garden at your school.
- Arboretum (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
This site offers directions on how to start your own rain garden. It offers a variety of lessons ranging from math problems to art to simple observations. Its a great idea for any class and any age.
- Life Lab
This site provides Life Lab lessons in garden and sustainability education as well as links to other good teacher resources including garden-based literature lists, sites with even more garden-based lessons, and much more!
- Ag Classroom
This site is one of the most useful sites I found and can be used when looking for sample lessons ranging from health and safety to nutrition to environmental mathematics. You simply enter in what type of lesson you are looking for and grade and what content you would like to teach and the website finds resources for lessons for you. To give you an idea I took a virtual farm tour and learned the parts of a fish.
From native plant education: Learning about what is native to a given environment creates awareness of ecosystems and how they are unique to specific environments/ communities in which these children are coming from. Through education about natives to an area, students are able to engage in the history of a given land as well as specified uses for each plant.
Why Garden with Native Plants?
-Save water
-Lower Maintenance
-Reduce Pesticides
-Invite Wildlife
-Support Local Ecology
- California Native Plant Society
This website offers many resources in relation to native plants of California. There are some resources that offer lesson plans for teachers and educators. One such link is to lessons for 4-8 grades about California oak trees. Also there is a section that offers information about developing a garden that has native plans and the benefits.
- Wild Ones Native Plants, Natural Landscapes
Offers information about Advocating Native Plants in Natural Landscapes, Preservation and Restoration of Native Communities and Promoting Environmental Education. In the education area there are many links to information and access to kids activities, such as kidsgardening.org.
- UCSC Arboretum
Information about the arboretum in Santa Cruz, it houses many plants that are from California, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and Chile. When learning about California native plants this would be a good resource especially when in Santa Cruz and possibly for a field trip.
- UCSC Arboretum
This pdf, created in 2009, is a very useful selection of native California plants and their traditional uses it also provides photos of each plant.
- Native Again Landscape
This site offers examples and instructions for converting your lawn to a native plant garden.
- California Gardens
This site holds much information about plants, which ones are drought tolerant and about creating your own native plant garden.
- Companion Planting
This site good resource about gardening and this particular article gives information about companion gardening, increasing the biodiversity of your garden and about growing plants who are beneficial next to each other. There is a large list of many that grow well together and their effects.
From the local/organic movement: With the growing prevalence of globalization and focus on national issues, it is very important to educate student on how they can support their own community through local food purchases. Organic is becoming a widely popular word and students need to understand what it means, the benefits of organic farming, and the difference they can make by purchasing organic foods.
- Lesson Planet
Lesson Planet is a search engine for teachers to access lesson plans on a plethora of topics. Lesson Planet has over 1,000 lesson plans specifically on buying local and also allows you to find worksheets specific to that. The lessons are also reviewed by other teachers and given a grade.
- Lesson Plans for Growing and Living Organic
This website provides a collection of 14 lesson plans for a variety of a grade levels. While not a very visually appealing, it does explore a range of fascinating topics about organics. The lesson plans are specific to Ontario, but could easily adapted to any classroom.
- Local Harvest
The Local Harvest website offers a maps of farms, farmers markets, and small farms that offer interactive activities as well as links to all of the farms websites. There are ideas for parents on how to teach children about eating organic and locally and lots of information on CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture, ventures. This website provides an easy to use guide for farms across America.
- The Greens
Meet the Greens is a PBS original series for kids. The show aims to educate children on the benefits of environmental stewardship and green practices. This link directs viewers to a particular episode about the benefits of buying local. From this site you can access information on why buying local is important and the main page for Meet the Greens.
- Nourish Life
Nourish Life aims to educate students about where food comes from and it’s impact on community through conversation, videos, and news articles. There are resources for teachers and parents including curriculum guides, worksheets, and videos. Nourish also provides examples of ways in which students, teachers, and parents can act on the information that they learn on the Website. They really emphasize community involvement.
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