In its first year, the new Del Mar Heights School garden has bloomed into a little haven for hands-on learning and environmental stewardship, giving kids a chance to take a break from their day to connect with nature. And there’s only room to grow.
On a recent sunny spring Friday, Garden Club students gathered at lunchtime in the garden to pick bouquets of sweet peas, plant corn seeds, pop popcorn and harvest bunches of carrots to make fresh carrot juice, blended up with apple, cucumber and with a bit of sugar for sweetness. “It’s so refreshing!” remarked one satisfied customer, taking a sip.
“It’s more than just a garden,” said Affnan Zubi, a parent volunteer who serves on the PTA board. “It’s a living classroom where students explore science, nutrition and sustainability in a meaningful, engaging way.”
The garden project at Del Mar Heights has received from a $10,000 grant from the Sprouts Healthy Communities Foundation and a $750 grant from San Diego Ag in the Classroom. The grants have been used to improve the garden’s resources and partly fund their “amazing” garden coordinator, Stephanie Murphy, who is back from a hiatus while the new school was being built.
A space for a garden was carved out on the new campus, in the far corner of the field adjacent to the Torrey Pines Reserve. The garden started out with eight raised beds and some fruit trees, including lemon, Mexican lime, Valencia orange, Cara Cara orange and an Anna apple —as Zubi said, the kids really love to pick the apples so it’s hard to keep them on the branches. With the go-ahead from the istration, the PTA got to work last summer applying for grants, doing some planting and installing irrigation, which proved to be somewhat of a challenge. The Dads’ Club assembled the shed and built covers to place over the beds to keep out any critters.
The Garden Club got started in September with their first big planting held in coordination with Harvest Fest. From that point on, the students started meeting every Friday.
“The kids line up, they are so eager to get in,” Zubi said of the kids who wait in a line outside the gate, coming over in groups by class.
Each Friday, the kids have a garden task to do and then they get to try a snack, centered around that day’s task such as planting corn seeds and then enjoying freshly popped popcorn. Volunteers help to guide the kids through the garden: “The parents are great, the moms and dads and grandparents have been amazing,” Murphy said.
Zubi said the kids love all the different juices they have tried, from sweet potato smoothies to ion fruit juice and fresh-squeezed lemonade: “Celery juice was a big hit.”
Every week, the kids vote on their favorites out of what they have sampled.
“This is the first year and we’re trying to figure out what works,” Zubi said. “Next year we’re hoping to incorporate more lessons.”
This year, they brought the kindergartners for a lesson in adaptation—the students planted carrot seeds concentrated close together and then some spaced apart. Over time, the experiment showed them how plants adapt and react to their environment.
In year one, the lettuce harvest was bountiful and kids enjoyed salads and lettuce wraps. The garden recently switched over to summer crops like peppers, tomatoes, strawberry corn and sweet potatoes—the first graders planted potatoes that they will be able to harvest next year as second graders.
The sweet pea bed is almost always overflowing, no matter how many blooms the kids pick, in pretty pinks and purples. The hope is to plant milkweed and other pollinator plants to bring in more butterflies.
“It’s small, but we make the best of the space that we do have,” said Murphy on another successful Friday in the garden. “It seems like we never missed a beat from the first garden.”
