Two New Community Gardens Taking Shape

Petaluma Bounty’s first two new community gardens are in the ground and ready for the Spring growing season. On January 20th, and then again on February 4th, community volunteers converged on the McDowell and McKinley Elementary Schools, to transform grass fields into school/community gardens. In total, more than 80 people, aged 3 to 63, came to help out, armed with wheelbarrows, shovels, rakes and tons of energy.

The Gardens Taking Shape…

McDowell Garden Work Day - January 20th, 2007

McDowell Principal Liz Schott, cleaning up

Although it looked like these folks were just building gardens, in fact they were building something far more important: They were building community. They were also helping to transform Petaluma’s food system, by building new “food self-sufficiency” for those families who will be growing their own fresh, organic food, at almost no cost.

Both of these new school/community gardens have dedicated school garden beds for the classrooms along with separate community garden beds for local families. They will also have shared teaching/rest areas, storage sheds for tools and supplies, compost bins and other features that each garden team may wish to build.

To ensure that these gardens flourish for many years to come, Petaluma Bounty will be hiring and funding a garden coordinator for the next year and a half, dedicated to these two gardens. This coordinator will help to integrate garden learning activities into student’s existing classroom programs, and will also be a resource to the community gardeners.

…and McKinley School Garden Work Day - February 4th, 2007

Laiken James, putting his back into it

Petaluma City Schools, our partner in these gardens, has contributed the land for the gardens and installed brand new irrigation systems at both garden sites, at a cost of several thousands of dollars’ worth of materials and hundreds of hours of labor. The Principals at the two schools, Liz Schott (McDowell Elementary) and Sherry Devine (McKinley Elementary) have lent their enthusiastic support to these gardens and have been instrumental in engaging their school communities in the project.