School Garden Teacher Training Sessions Set

UGA is offering school garden teacher training sessions again this year to help teachers get the most out of their school gardens.

Two sessions, one in Cartersville (Thursday, June 16) and one in Savannah (Monday, June 13), will cover the basics of  healthy soil, planting for the school calendar, food safety, and pest management, along with lesson plans for use in the garden.

An additional session for teachers with more experience in the garden, to take place in Marietta (Tuesday, June 21st), will cover pollinator spaces, composting, more on food safety, grant writing, and advanced planting techniques.

All sessions include the following:

• Online education
• Learning experiments to be completed at home
• In person workshop taught by Extension professionals
• Participants will receive a certificate of completion
• Network with other educators and subject experts

 The $30 fee for each session includes the at-home learning package, lunch on the workshop day, and workshop materials.

Additional information about dates, times, and class content, and links for registration for the 3 training sessions is on the School Garden Teacher Training webpage of the UGA Center for Urban Agriculture.

NOTE: Georgia Organics is offering scholarships for each training location, for the first five teachers from schools that earned a Golden Radish award. If registering from a Golden Radish school, please contact Becky Griffin (beckygri@uga.edu ) prior to registering.

Pollinator Spaces Across Georgia

Flowers for pollinators at a small community garden.

UGA Extension is encouraging the planting of pollinator spaces in community and school gardens through a new Pollinator Spaces Project.

The project gathers up on the Pollinator Spaces webpages  links to information about pollinators and gardens and information about upcoming classes and events  about pollinators.

Photos of pollinator spaces either newly created or already in existence can be posted on the UGA Community and School Gardens Facebook page or emailed to beckygri@uga.edu for posting on the website. Participating gardens will receive a certificate and be added to a map to show that support for pollinators in Georgia extends from border to border. At the end of the year, the map will be amazing to see!

For gardeners hoping to learn more about pollinators and the kinds of help we can offer these beleaguered garden helpers, check out publications at the link provided on UGA's "Building your pollinator garden" page.

For gardeners who would rather take a shortcut to learning which plants are pollinator-friendly, UGA offers this list on its "Plants for Pollinators" promotion card for the Spaces project:

Anise Hyssop
Aster
Button Bush
Catmint
Celosia spicata
Coneflower
Cosmos
Dill
Goldenrod
Mexican sunflower
Milkweed
Salvia - Hot Lips
Sunflower
Thyme
Verbena
Zinnia

Cobb Community Gardens to Hear from Captain Planet Foundation

Kyla Van Deusen of the Captain Planet Foundation will be the featured speaker at the next meeting of Cobb Community Gardens. Van Deusen will be presenting information about Project Learning Garden and how to get involved and support school gardens.

As part of its mission, the Captain Planet Foundation has helped thousands of schools develop pollinator and food gardens, among other projects, and Project Learning Garden extends that support to the development of garden-based learning programs in schools.


WHEN: Wednesday, October 28, 6:30 p.m.
WHERE: Cobb Water Quality Lab meeting room
               662 South Cobb Drive
               Marietta, GA, 30060


The meeting and presentation are free and open to all interested in managing and supporting community and school gardens.

The mission of Cobb Community Gardens is to share ideas, information, and resources to help support and promote community gardens throughout Cobb County.

For information, email debbie@esmithair.com .

School Garden Teacher Training this Summer

Learn how to establish and use a beautiful, productive school garden to its full potential as an educational tool with new UGA trainings that are being offered this summer.

The classes provide flexibility for busy teachers by including self-paced, online work to complete prior to an in-person session that will teach hands-on, practical skills to use in the garden.

Interested teachers can choose the location most convenient for them for their hands-on day:

• June 23rd at the Research and Education Garden on UGA’s Griffin campus
• June 25th at the UGArden in Athens
• June 30th at the North Fulton Government Annex on Roswell Road, Atlanta

New Help for School Gardens

UGA has created a new online resource center to to help teachers use school gardens to enhance student learning.  The Georgia FACES article "School Garden Curriculum Resource Center helps teachers use school gardens" describes the free resource, which offers lesson plans for Kindergarten through Eighth grade, and the plans follow the curriculum prescribed in the Georgia Performance Standards.

David Knauft, a professor of horticulture at UGA, collected and adapted the school garden lesson plans with the help of former agriculture teacher Alicia Holloway in order to make it easier for teachers to use their school gardens or to start new gardens.

"During his research, Knauft found many teachers didn’t feel they had time to work gardening into their teaching day and didn’t have the support they needed to maintain the gardens.

'We conducted four focus groups with teachers, administrators and volunteers across Georgia, asking them about the value of the gardens and what we could do to help,' Knauft said. 'They said that providing information to help establish and grow their gardens and how to work them into the existing curriculum, so that they could more easily use the gardens, would make a big difference.'”

In addition to the lesson plans, The School Garden Resource Center (click on the linked name to go to the site) also includes comprehensive information about starting and maintaining a school garden and information about grants and funding sources.