The Orca K-8 School Garden Blog!

The Garden design was created by Emily Bishton of Green Light Gardening. She has put together an amazing plan that incorporates great ideas compiled from Orca students, teachers, and community members. How about  herb, tea, medicinal plant, and tea gardens? Yes! It is going to be an amazing resource for our community! We will be having a planting party on Jan 10th. Please come and plant with us from 10am-2pm that day!

An Orca student looking at the new garden design that is posted in the hallway. Please take a look, it is outside the main office!

Garden coordinator Anthony Warner leads a worm workshop in Janessa's class

It is true that everbody loves worms!

Janessa’s class received a brand new worm bin that came with a cool lesson on how to feed the worms lunch food scraps! Six Orca classrooms have worm bins AND coming in 2009 Orca school will be processing 100% of non-cooked breakfast and lunch scraps into worm bins. The rest of our cooked/protein food waste will be picked up by Cedar Grove Compost and made into bags of compost for NW yards. This is done in the hope that thousands of pounds of waste will be processed at Orca instead of in a landfill.

The worm bins are courtesy of an amazing grant from Seattle Public Utilities to reduce waste in Seattle. We will be building 5 large worm bins and turning them into benches also (Thanks to Seattle Tilth for inspiration). This amazing grant will help Orca lead the district in sustainable practices.

To see the grant, click here: SPU grant

The classroom worm bins are from: http://www.cascadewormbin.com/

Seattle has it’s worst freeze since 1990, just a few days before our Dec. 20th planting party. So we went into emergency mode to cover our beds and try to save our chard, kale, and other winter greens! Hopefully the beds will warm up in the sun while under that plastic. Orca students had planted a ton of veggies that we planned would last through the Winter. We can only hope! This was the first day for our brand new VISTA volunteer- Briahn Martin, who will be with us for a year to expand our garden program and develop important relationships with the community. Welcom Briahn! Well, the planting party will be postponed until January 10th- so stay tuned!