We did it! The School Garden is Complete! 2

The school garden is complete! We started the day by giving our student gardeners a short lesson on the soil portions we were using and why they’re important for a healthy garden.

The kids were ready to garden, but first, a quick lesson was in order 🙂

The soil composition we chose was  1/3 peat moss, 1/3 mushroom compost, and 1/3 vermiculite with 20 pounds of  crushed rock (donated by White Rock Quarry) to add minerals for the plants to stay extra healthy. The crushed rock is called “sand fill” in the picture, but it’s not really sand.

The supplies. What’s the cardboard for?

The cardboard is for extra protection against weeds and grass that could grow on the bottom. Cardboard is also an amazing compost material that our native-to-Florida red wriggler earthworms will love! Earthworms help compost many organic things like food scraps—and even cardboard! It will be completely composted by the year’s end. We would have used recycled cardboard, but this was already donated.

These are some enthusiastic young gardeners!

Everyone was pitching in 🙂

As we found our pace, we saw a storm heading our way!

Let’s hurry everyone!

The student gardeners went inside well before the storm came. We, however, braved the beautiful storm to finish setting up and planting the flowers. We did get just a little wet…

The storm came. We were soaking wet, but happy that we finished the garden!

And here is the culmination of everyone’s hard work:

A flower garden? I thought this was supposed to have vegetables?

Why did we plant flowers instead of vegetables? These flowers are just a cover crop. Since most of our veggies will be planted in the Fall, around August, we need some plants to enrich the soil and protect it. If the soil was bare, without any plants, the rain would wash away all of its nutrients. Planting these flowers helps keep the soil healthy and full of nutrients for our future veggies.

We’re elated and very thankful to the Creator for his countless blessings and to the many people and companies that helped make the garden at Clara Mohammed School a reality. We’ll thank everyone in a separate post coming soon 🙂

Humanity is family. Thank you and God bless.

Footnotes:

1. We used Mel Bartholomew‘s soil mixture guide. We heard of it from this helpful YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/0Lo6209qgJ0?t=1m40s.  We also saw ready-made bags of Mel’s mixture at Flamingo Road Nursery in Davie, FL. It would have been too expensive to fill the 48 cubic feet with ready made bags, so we purchased all the components separately. It was more affordable for us to buy the 15 cubic feet of Peat Moss from Lowe’s and the rest of the material from Flamingo Road Nursery.