 All right, so we're ready for our last presentation of the afternoon. I'm pleased to have Jennifer Grabner. And for those of you not from right around the Columbia area, this is a presentation about a project here in Boone County, which is the county we're in. And so Jennifer's going to talk to us about a learning garden that she helped get going there. So Jennifer. Thanks very much for coming. Like he said, we're down in Ashland. About five years ago, a friend and I, Leslie Moillon, as we got to be friends, realized we had some shared interests and passions and decided to start a school gardening program, not really realizing back then what it was going to turn into today. But it's really grown phenomenally and turned into quite a program. If you have any questions throughout, please feel free to ask. Just a little bit of background on me. My training, my education is in forest ecology and wildlife biology, worked for the state for several years as a research botanist. Then when we had our second child, decided to stay home, got more into gardening, been a lifelong gardener, but got more into gardening with our kids. And that just kind of blossomed into the passion that I have for it now. Let's see here. So five years ago, Leslie Moillon and I started the program and we decided to start as an after-school club with our elementary school. She had a background in sustainable education and I had the background that I just listed for you. So we did a little bit of research upfront and it was very clear even five years ago, all the research showing multiple benefits for school gardening programs, particularly within a public school setting. And these are just some of them. Obviously it helps to increase the interest and improve attitudes towards eating fresh fruits and vegetables, improve the nutrition knowledge, helps improve attitudes toward the environment. A lot of the education, environmental education that kids get today is pretty negative in nature. School gardens have been shown to be a way to get the information to the kids, but in a much more positive way, in a way that shows them that they can actually make a difference and help not just learn about the problems but learn what they can do to kind of mitigate some of the problems. And then of course, when you're dealing with schools, the all-important test scores across the board seeing lots of improvement, especially in science and math scores with districts that have school gardening programs. So this is just our mission as it stands right now. Basically we want to provide space and resources for our teachers. We want to do this in a fun way, but in a real hands-on learning way. And we want to promote this not only within the school, but also throughout the whole community. And that's been a major focus of ours from the start is to do this as a partnership, not just with the school, but with the entire community. And to give you an idea, like you said, Ashland is just south of Columbia. So we're halfway in between Columbia and Jefferson City. Kind of a pretty typical bedroom community in a lot of ways. Most families have at least one person that works either in Columbia or Jeff City. But the school district in that area is very strong, very well-respected school district. So to kind of give you an idea of what we do now, we focus in two main ways. We have an after-school club that we still run, and we also do a lot of school day programming. And the focus for our school day programming is really kind of three things. We want to try to make direct connections with the classroom curriculum, with what the teachers are already teaching in the classroom as much as we can. And we do this in multiple ways. We also have learned, and the kids have taught this to us over the years, if we don't save time at each garden lesson for them to go around and taste the vegetables that are growing out there, then they actually get mad. And they've even said to me, Mrs. Grabner, can't we just eat some kale or something? So we learned right away, really, that that has to be part of each experience. The kids are really asking for that. And then it's also really just an attempt to get more physical activity into the school day. Our district is like a lot of districts where we've had to cut PE time, we've had to cut recess time. The sports that the kids are involved with is all pretty structured kind of activity. So this is just a chance for them during the school day to get up and move and use their hands and feet in a different way. And our goal, typically, for each semester is to work with each teacher in our preschool through fifth grades, at least a couple times each semester. So what that means, we have 35 teachers from preschool up through fifth grade, about 700 kids. So we try to get all of them out there into the garden a couple of times in the fall and a couple of times in the spring. That can be quite a challenge a lot of the time, but for the last three years, we've done that successfully. Just to let you know, we're a 100% volunteer organization, have been all five years. We've got over 60 different people that contribute and volunteer their time each year. Last year, we logged over 2,000 hours of volunteer time, and that was not including minor Leslie's time. So quite a broad support for it. Giving ideas of some of the things we do with our school day programming, we can touch on anything in the garden. It's not just science or nutrition. We do a lot of social studies, literature, art, history type lessons. Some of the examples you see in the left corner there. With fourth grade, they do a big unit studying Lori Ingalls Wilder and her pieces of work in the spring. So we have planted staple crops, talked about the books like Farmer Boy and the Little House books, and we have samples of old farm tools that are out there, just kind of as decoration around the garden. So the kids come out, make connections with the books that they're reading in class, learn about why it was so important back then to plant those staple crops and how to harvest and store them, and just make a kind of a hands-on connection with that literature. The same for down here in the right corner, the Japanese garden. Third grade does a big social studies unit on Japan in the spring, and so we've for a couple years now learned about Japanese styles of gardening and getting into using small spaces wisely, but just kind of getting into the culture of that, and then we plant things like Tokyo turnips and some of the other Asian vegetables that grow quickly and grow really well in small spaces. Again, to tie into that, we do a lot of eco-art projects out there, so we'll make more connections with how to recycle and use some of that recycled material as art and decoration in the garden, and painted our rain barrels. We do a lot of stepping stones and sun catchers and things like that out there. And then another social studies unit that we touch on, we'll do a Three Sisters Garden each year, and that touches on the Native American tradition of planting corn and beans and squash. Then we can bring in a nutrition lesson with that and talk about how those foods work together to make complete food, complete healthy proteins. So just lots of ways to bring all kinds of GLEs if you're a teacher, grade level expectations or core standards, touch on multiple standards with each lesson, get a lot of integration and enhancing the classroom learning. More examples with math and science and nutrition, of course, a lot of these are just no-brainers when you're out there, but we've done quite a few math lessons ranging from learning how to do... It's kind of hard to compete with those guys. Learning how to do multiplication arrays. The kids have to learn to visualize, say, three times four, that math problem. They have to be able to create a visual array of three columns by four rows. Well, we do that in the garden all the time, right, when we plant. So we'll talk about square foot gardening. Then we lay out their arrays. They do some math. Decide on an array that they're going to plant in. And then all winter long, now the fourth graders are watching as their turnips and their lettuce and things are growing up in the shape of the array that they plant them in, hopefully. And sometimes we get a, you know, a handful of turnip seeds that somehow get dropped here and there, but there's a lot of randomness when you're gardening with kids. Other math lessons that we do, just simple measuring, you know, in second and third grade, they're learning how to measure in different units. So we take tape measures and rulers and yard sticks and things, and they go around and just measure stuff in the garden. Also in fourth and fifth grade, they're working on how to calculate perimeter and area, things like that. So the raised beds that we have out there are all geometric shapes, triangles and squares and rectangles. They go around and measure, you know, they'll predict first how much area they think is there, and then they go out and actually measure it. Again, just a way for the teacher to teach what she's already teaching, but to do it in a different setting, a more fun setting, and just something that the kids are more likely to remember when they're doing it. We do a lot of water cycle lessons with fifth grade. They do a big weather unit in the winter and spring. So that's what the kids have in their picture there. We love to dig and compost with every grade, so we always get out there from kindergarten on up and explore the compost, learn what's going on as things decompose and just ooh and ah over all the bugs and cool stuff that we find in there. Really, I think we could just have piles of compost and everybody would be just as happy. So, just some examples of lessons that we do. With the After School Club, it's for third, fourth and fifth graders. It's really a popular club. It has become too popular for us to handle right now, which is a good problem to have. We had over 50 kids apply for our Fall Club. We were only planning to take 15. We decided to up that to 20, but we still have 30 kiddos and these are all kids that have not been in the program so out of the 300 kids in that building, it was quite a strong response. So we're hoping to run two separate programs in the spring if we can get enough volunteer leaders to do that. With the After School Club, of course, we want to focus on just teaching basic gardening, how to plant, how to water, fertilizing, weeding, all that stuff. Then we do a lot of cooking and nutrition with the After School kids. They love to be able to get into the school kitchen and work. That's a huge treat for them. We're lucky in Ashland because we still have full service kitchens. They've actually cooked their food still there and the staff has been more than accommodating for us so we're able to use both the primary and elementary school kitchens do a lot of cooking with the After School kids. Then of course we want to get a lot of physical activity in there. When we first started out, I guess it was the first semester with the After School Club. Part of the time we'll have the kids journal about what they've been doing or what they're working on in the club. The kids made it pretty clear that they were not really interested in journaling. They've been journaling all day long. They wanted to move, they wanted to eat, they wanted to move, they wanted to really just be up and moving. We realized that that part of it that we thought would be so cool, a couple of kids got into it, a couple of them really were just done with that part of the academic side of school for the day. So that was a good lesson. Then we do a lot of eco art projects. The kids they love to do, you can see the ceiling fan blades over there, our flowers and so we get a lot of donated ceiling fans now and ours need to be replaced now. The paints worn off and the blades are falling off but so we just try to do a lot of that kind and make it a fun space as you walk in. It doesn't look like an adult's garden. It looks like a kid's garden, one that's welcoming and lots of room to run around in there for them. So this just kind of illustrates where our volunteers come from which is everywhere. It really is one of those projects that pulls in people from just about every walk of life you can imagine. The thing that they share is that they care of course about the kids to have that connection with their food, connection with the land and they want the schools to do as good of a job as they can and they see that this is helping. So we really have a tremendous group of volunteers and it just keeps getting bigger all the time. The same throughout the community we've got a huge list of groups and agencies that have supported us for the last five years really this kind of is everybody that's in the Ashland area that is on that list in some way or another. So I kind of just was trying to think about reasons that the program has been so successful and been so well received and this is what I came up with. We've from the start knew that we wanted to focus on quality programming, offering a quality experience for the kids and for the teachers and not just quantity. We didn't want to just get two lessons with every classroom teacher every semester and not care about the quality of it. If we couldn't do a good job at it then we weren't going to do it and that's been important. Another thing is that the school from the very beginning has been very generous, very supportive the Ashland school district is lucky in that they have a lot of land that they own so space has never been for us. I know of other districts around the country and around the region where the administration is reluctant to let a group of parents try something like this for liability issues or whatever. We've never run into any of that they've just been completely supportive but we've never asked them for anything we've never asked them for money we've never required the teachers to do anything they didn't want to do so I think we have to give and take. We haven't presented it as you guys need to do this we just presented it as if you want to do this here we'll help you make it happen and I think that's been important. We've always had the long term in mind we knew that we wanted to keep this going and hopefully get this to be integrated into the school's curriculum so that after we're gone other people can just easily take it on the steering committee which Bill was a part of and then we last year we incorporated as a non-profit so we now have a board of directors that kind of sets our long range visioning make sure we stay on our mission and vision and like I listed before we've had a strong active base of community supporters and partners and that's been key and just constantly networking things like this to get the word out there let people know that not only do we need help and volunteers but we're also available as a resource for programs and schools that are interested in starting up a similar thing. We recently have applied for a Missouri foundation for health grant and have been notified actually that we're being recommended to their board for full funding which if their board approves that in the middle of November then that's going to ramp us up to a whole new level. That's going to mean one of the main things we proposed for that grant was to develop a community partnership a healthy community partnership to bring in all the folks that have supported the learning garden over the years and to bring in even more community groups and kind of work towards getting healthy living initiatives throughout Southern Boone County so we're going to be working with the City of Ashland to get more sidewalks and parks and bike paths in the community working with the school district to improve their wellness policy trying to get a farm to school program going down there walking school bus program down there all kinds of initiatives that we hope to get going with that partnership the grant will also allow us to expand and work with kids in the middle and high school levels not just the younger grades which we're very excited about we've got teachers that are already itching ready to put beds in over at the high school and it will also allow us to do a lot of outreach out into other communities and areas around the region like I said so keep your fingers crossed hopefully that will go through and this again this is the long list of all the folks that we've already made contacts with who are interested in being part of this partnership to make the things on the right actually happen down in our community and these things on the right are things that we think will be able to do but given the the climate in the community and the state just the interest the high level of interest of all these partners I really think we've got an excellent shot of being able to do all of these things on the right and more it's just it's a really good time for our community to work towards this in fact I made another connection today with somebody who was like yeah let's get a rec center built down there so I think we're going to be able to do some cool stuff so just kind of summarizing what can a school garden do and what is it doing for us it's enriching our public education it's providing a space for teachers to have an outdoor classroom space and to extend their classroom learning in a way that they weren't able to before we're getting our kids excited and interested in eating fresh fruits and vegetables and definitely in a way that most these kids didn't know what charred was or kale or had never eaten a sweet potato or anything like that and so now we have kids that are a lot more educated about where the food comes from or where it could come from and just more interested in eating healthy and it also really can be a way to unite a community and we've seen that without a doubt you know people come together in a garden and around kids and it's just a good combination so I think that's all I've got I don't know if I'm on time there but no we did not have SARE funding thank you she asked if we had SARE funding for this project and we did not I think the way that I got put in this category I'm a former SARE recipient myself we ran a winter vegetable farm for a few years and so I guess somebody got a hold of me through that and said hey you want to give a talk but yeah we are actually thinking of going for the SARE educational funding next year because we want to put in an outdoor kind of an outdoor classroom space where we're going to have an outdoor kitchen and space to be out of the wind and rain she said she didn't see on the list MU I guess you're talking about MU Extension Cooperative Extension and they were on there MU Extension we've worked with them at least they should have been maybe I left them off we don't have a 4-H club that's part of it right now we're not technically partnered with them hopefully in the future I know we've got a couple of active 4-H groups in our region we haven't worked with them directly but we will because I know they've got great curriculum materials and things like that it is definitely and with Extension we've received money through Extension's healthy lifestyle initiative they've been supportive that way Vera Massey and Cohen and folks like that work quite a bit with them yes sir doing the raised devs and mending the soil and for something that's not there already working up how did you get things started and did you have to worry about establishing a garden yeah the question he said in his community with the poor soil it's hard to get things started get the upfront funds I guess for raised beds with good soil in them in hindsight we maybe would have done a little more upfront research and got money ahead Leslie and I didn't do that we just said hey let's do a garden and so we were literally working in a mud pit for the first year and we just we got the local hardware store to donate some scrap lumber and we literally slapped together raised beds with the kids and just started piling compost we would get compost from here at Columbia they're the city composting program 12 bucks to pick upload and you get a compost that's plantable it's got a great texture we would just mix that with the soil and with some other compost just over the years kind of built it up like that but we used our own funds out of pocket for some of that we received a couple of small grants through the I think it's National Gardening Association they have a kids gardening program with Home Depot they've got a school garden grant program we received a couple of $500 scholarships from them and that goes a long way most of the other stuff donated from the community really supplies like that has not been an issue for us to get donated either from businesses or individuals we say hey we need some shovels or we need some dirt or can you use your tractor for half a day and help us and we've got enough people around the area that are more than willing to help out with that sorry how many schools do you have gardens how many schools we just have one garden the Ashland Southern Boon is just one school district they have four buildings and the current garden site is right next to two of those buildings the primary and elementary the lower grades we're getting ready to put more beds in over by the middle and high school which are on the other end of town but we're just dealing with one school district does that answer your question yeah Joan mentioned that the Whole Foods Foundation has a school garden grant and they actually have an open call right now for school garden programs and there are actually several smaller grants available you spend 10 or 15 minutes online and you'll bring up a whole list of grant funding opportunities usually they're within the $500 to $5,000 range some of them are specific for starting up a school garden some of them are specific for maintaining a program that's already existing but if you check out that kidsgardening.org website you'll get a lot of resources from that one page I'm sorry American Community Gardening Association I think it's through the National Gardening Association NGA, yep but if you just Google Kids Gardening it should come up and be one of the top four or five lists that will come up there