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SO MANY 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝

New England Aster

🩷🩷🩷🩷

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July 23, 2025

The Bus Stop Garden -

Summer 1 -

Milkweed, Sedum, Marigolds, Nasturtium and Sunflowers

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more garden beauties with the student's herb rock identification

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garden beauties

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we found milkweed in our school neighborhood!

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inviting guests to our monarch butterfly celebration-students displayed and shared their learning

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monarch butterfly habitat diorama

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Chanelle posing with milkweed

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Getting ready for our Monarch butterfly celebration

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Marigolds going home with our 8th grade graduates.

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Building the Beds.

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Planting.

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Turning the soil to prep our beds for our compost.

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Getting ready to release them...but first we observed them!

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The painted ladies are here!

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This was our flier that went out to all school families inviting them to the Garden Party :)

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The last stage of the garden renovation was installing the fencing, which will protect the gardens from soccer balls and dogs! This time around it was all students from our lower elementary school who installed the fence.

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It took a village!

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Parents and students all helped out!

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Scenes from our planting day :)

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More scenes from our big planting day :)

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Students have been a critical part of getting the gardens established.

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Stage 2: Parents and children came back to pour rocks into the "stream bed" of the Forgiveness Garden.

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Scenes from our big planting day - restoring the Peace and Forgiveness Gardens that had been lost to draught and to neighborhood construction.

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Students were given dhalia tubers to explore in small groups. They were able to identify roots, last years stems, and new growth.  Some students even guessed that they were tubers because they have nodes!

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One particularly cold and rainy week we brought the outdoors in!  A garden cart allowed me to bring the grow bags into the school, and then back out to the garden.  

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Students continue to observe and care for the growing potato plants.  

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No more weeds or broken beds -- everything is reinforced, planted, and mulched. Can't wait to watch it grow! Thank you!! 💚

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This week, we harvested and tasted strawberries, green onions, lemon balm and sage.

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Transplanting the final perennial herbs, flowers, and watermelon

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Adding more topsoil and compost

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The team brought a milk crate garden to the showcase as part of their presentation.

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We now have 25 of these milk crate planters ready to be "adopted". Students will have choices about what to plant next.

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The cafeteria donated 25 milk crates and Recover Green Roofs donated 25 milk crate liners. During April vacation, students worked with volunteers to fill the milk crates with a combination of mulch, manure and soil, burying the olla pots until just the top (bottom) is visible. 

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We decided to use makeshift olla pots to retain moisture in the soil.

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Our service learning team proposed creating milk crate gardens to beautify our outdoor space and to be "adopted" by individual students who do not have a yard of their own. The project is aimed at helping our homeless and housing insecure students feel connected to school. The project is just one part of a larger initiative to create a more environmentally healthy and welcoming space in the empty area on the west and south side of the school.

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Preparing the land for the autumn. One layer of Cardboard for the worms, one layer of black plastic to block the sun.

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First Graders planting the potato plants they grew from cuttings indoors into the large potato grow bags outdoors. 

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Decorating the rock plant markers to beautify our garden beds! 

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Our second all school event was preparing decorations for our soon to be planted garden beds. As we wait for our soil to finish composting, this was a fun way to keep our students engaged with our soon to be perennial gardens.

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8th graders created flower pots for annuals to decorate for graduation.

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Creating Garden Decor for our new garden beds.

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Consolidated existing perennial herbs into one bed, transferred strawberries and walking onions, added mulch

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Adding straw for mulch

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Adding topsoil and compost to transplant existing perennials

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Transferring soil from raised bed that was pushed into the next one by a snow plough

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Building new top frames

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Welcome Summer!

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Only Native Milkweed plants for our gardens.

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The beginning of our second area established for Milkweed. There are Sunflowers and Marigolds as well.

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Prepping a long empty piece of land that gets lots of Sunlight.

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Final harvest

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We just completed our final harvest for the year from our hydroponic units. This time we grew mainly butter lettuce. Time to do a deep clean and store them for next year.

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Building it...

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Our rain barrel arrived and we assembled it. While the plan was to place it in our outdoor garden, we might use it as part of a filtration system in our school to supply water for our hydroponic units since we are not allowed to use the tap water.

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Today, we were harvesting in the garden.

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Teamwork: reinforcing the corners with 3" deck screws

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Taking turns to learn how to use the saw

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These are some of our old raised garden beds. One has been pushed into a neighboring bed by a snow plow. We will repair their structure, dig up the existing perennials, add top soil, compost, and mulch, and return and add more perennials.

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at the garden planting some of our herbs!

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New plants going in. Thank you Friends of The Boston Schoolyards 😁

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Group photo of the class preparing the beds and picking up trash.

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Our first activity was creating soil / compost from trash. This was a whole school activity that had our older students working with our younger students.

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Students lined up to measure their velocity of tennis forehands 

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Applying lead tape on the tennis racquet before running experiments 

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Using lead tape to see the impact that increased mass has on applied force of a tennis racquet 

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Coming soon!

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Just wait — this place will be blooming marvelous soon

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After winter had its way, the Frederick front entryway garden looked a little… unbeleafable. The weeds were thriving like they’d won the lottery, last year’s mulch had leafed behind only memories, and the whole space had settled into a full-blown resting plant face. Let’s say it was giving compost chic.

But even in its tangled, wild state, something special is germinating. The garden wasn’t a mess—it was a story still in the weeds. Plans have begun to sprout, and the LGF community is ready to dig in and give it a glow-up worthy of spring.

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Dirt, debris, and drama — we’re rooting for a comeback!

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It’s not a hot mess. It’s a botani-calm before the storm.

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Finished kits that were distributed to students and staff at the end of the day.

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We decided to include salad dressing in the kits so the only thing people had to do was wash the lettuce and enjoy it.

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We even made a huge salad for lunch so everyone at school could try it.

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Lots of help needed to harvest the whole system. We had teams of students harvesting the lettuce, drying it, and assembling salad kits to go home.

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Harvesting day! Students were excited to harvest and make kits.

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We germinated our seeds and planted our first of the year crop in our hydroponic units. So exciting to see them growing.

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Transferring the sunflower seeds into pots.  They grew so fast! 

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Our 3rd graders preparing to plant seeds. 