Get a garden + the Ranger program in your school now. We have built over 100 in Los Angeles. We move rapidly. We take care of the permits. We make it ridiculously affordable. We are frugal. We can take on existing gardens and we know how to fix things.
You want your group volunteer day to actually mean something? You want lasting impact? We are so busy, we can guarantee almost any date you choose. You want to see results.
HUMANS
It is easy to help out. We are in 100 Los Angeles schools weekly and we care for our 100 gardens 332 days per year. If you want to help , we will put you to work. We are growing so rapidly that no matter what you have to offer, we likely need your talents. Engage today. Volunteer tomorrow.
For Our Garden Rangers
SCHOOL GARDENING?
OUR VALUES
A great way to end a session is to make a fresh salad with ingredients straight from the garden! Everyone worked together to slice, chop and dice, tomatoes and various types of kale, green onions and carrots. We also added pomegranate seeds and dressed the salad with a splash of vinager, sea salt and a…
Today the students walked into a smelly garden. It was a familiar smell for some, easily identified by a taboo word “poop”. Not just any old poo, but what is called manure from specific animals. Today we learned that using manure in the garden has numerous benefits. Manure is packed with nutrients tha plants need…
With a very high population of Hispanic students, we were thrilled to celebrate and talk about Dia de los Muertos! We also have the movie Coco to thank for getting kids educated and excited about this holiday. We are now working with fourth grade students and our main concept is diversity. We discuss native plants…
Learning about how soil is made is amazing. It’s been happening since the beginning of our Earth; the recycling of organic matter rich with nutrients, transformed into exactly what a plant needs. This week the kids at Woodlawn participated in “feeding” their compost bin with dead leaves, twigs and shredded paper from the school. They…
Getting to know herbs couldn’t be more fun when you play a game that gets the kids moving, touching and smelling plants in the garden. Today we did just that! I filled each of my “Touch and Feel” containers with an herb, labled the containers 1 thru 6 and placed one herb in each container;…
Making a prediction, a hypothesis or a claim is an important step to solving a question. At Aspire Gateway students had lots of questions about their favorite isopod in the garden; the pill bug. So we set up an experiment to learn what type of immediate environment pill bugs prefer; moist soil, dry soil, leafy…
Last week at Valley View Elementary School, the kindergarteners learned the value of composting. They knew how to use the bin but hadn’t learned the art of proper composting. We played a little relay game and discussed what goes in the bin and what should be put in the recycling or trash bin…
Getting preschoolers to vocalize and describe what they touch and feel can be challenging at times especially in a group setting where there are varying degrees of development in a classroom. So we played a fun game to get them talking (and learning) about fruits and vegetables that grow in their garden! First we harvested…
Plants and its natural world is a mystery, splendor, and yet to be fully discovered and understood. Many plants are also at risk or almost extinct from their natural habitat. Plants not only clean the air, water, soil… they provide food and shelter for animals and humans. Students observed Venus Flytraps and asked themselves questions about…
I decided to modify a lesson to include exercises on describing using adjectives. After several attempts at tasting a beet salad and an apple and arugula salad, I noticed that when I asked students how they tasted, a lot of students responded using the words “weird,” “gross,” or “good.” As I explained to the students,…
Plants and its natural world is a mystery, splendor, and yet to be fully discovered and understood. Many plants are also at risk or almost extinct from their natural habitat. Plants not only clean the air, water, soil… they provide food and shelter for animals and humans. Students observed Venus Flytraps and asked themselves questions about…
Plants and its natural world is a mystery, splendor, and yet to be fully discovered and understood. Many plants are also at risk or almost extinct from their natural habitat. Plants not only clean the air, water, soil… they provide food and shelter for animals and humans. Students observed Venus Flytraps and asked themselves questions about…
We’ve been getting some great harvests at our garden here at Dominguez! And today was no different! We’ve been on a mission to revive the fruit orchard and on my 3rd year teaching the students here, we are seeing the fruits of our labor. Pun intended, lol. We’ve shovel, fertilized, aerated, watered, pruned and loved…
The apple tree in the TAS garden has given us a nice supply of fruit this season. The kids never tired of our crispy cut up snacks and learning about this delicious food. I asked them to find out something interesting about apples and they wrote about how apples are part of the…
I had let the students know I was going to bring worms so they were all very excited. When the class of kindergarteners came into the garden, they immediately swarmed around me asking “are we going to see the worms today?!” I laughed and said yes. They eyed my large worm farm container with excitement.…
Hard work and dedication From bell to bell. With the garden treated for invasive weed growth over the summer, I told the my students that we would be building our garden from the soil UP, and it wouldn’t be as easy as picking daisies. They smirked and smiled and accepted the challenge! Learning to grow…
Since we’ve been working together in the garden for almost 3 months now, we are happy to have so much to harvest. Carrots, onions, radishes, broccoli, a variety of lettuces, and a crazy amount of kale! So this week we decided to do some outdoor cooking and make a cheesy purple kale dip that we could…
One of the big challenges of a school garden is to make it useable for all–it shouldn’t be a museum where students can only look at what is inside or a pristine place limited to only the kids who are enrolled in a garden class. At King, we are lucky to have a garden that…
Plants and its natural world is a mystery, splendor, and yet to be fully discovered and understood. Many plants are also at risk or almost extinct from their natural habitat. Plants not only clean the air, water, soil… they provide food and shelter for animals and humans. Students observed Venus Flytraps and asked themselves questions about…
Plants and its natural world is a mystery, splendor, and yet to be fully discovered and understood. Many plants are also at risk or almost extinct from their natural habitat. Plants not only clean the air, water, soil… they provide food and shelter for animals and humans. Students observed Venus Flytraps and asked them self questions…
I told the kids, “We’ve got to know the garden like the back of our hands.” And there’s no better way to achieve this than putting those hands in the soil! And so we did. But before that, we harvested our drying sunflowers so that we could try them raw and hopefully roast them with…
There are beans everywhere. Coming out of our ears. Drowning our sorrows away. Keeping our digestive track going. We did a taste test with a few of our peas to see if we enjoyed peas or beans more. Peas won by a long haul but most students said they enjoyed both. We have been harvesting…
From Earthworms to Kale Tacos at KIPP Comienza
Garden time this month for our friends at KIPP Comienza involved learning about compost, harvesting, and the butterfly cycle. Our compost lesson began with a short lesson on the compost cycle and was followed by a card game they played in pairs. We played with three different cycles: apples, bananas, and pumpkins; the objective was…
The students at El Sereno Elementary discovered that seeds come in all different shapes and sizes. They had fun investigating the seeds and guessing what plant the seed would turn into. And then finding some of the plants in our garden! We examined lima beans and cut them in half in order to see all…
One of the 4th grade classes at Atwater Elementary participated in a compost relay race. It was pouring rain outside in the garden so we had the race in the library. The students were placed in 5 different groups and had to complete 8 tasks to finish the race. Before we started the race, we…
This month at Berendo Middle School, the students learned about the soil pie chart, producers & consumers, climates & seasons, and parts of plants. This was these students first exposure to the garden so there was lots to learn! With the construction going on, the water had been turned off for a couple weeks so…
This month, the students at 2nd Street Elementary learned about dirt, friends & foes, seasons, and parts of plants. This was these students’ first exposure to the garden class so we were starting from ground zero- very exciting! For the “Let’s Talk Dirt” lesson, the students got their hands dirty touching some wet clay soil…
This month Vine St students worked hard on creating a good environment to cultivate and grow new plants. We learned about what we can compost and where we can put our food scraps to make healthy organic matter to add to our beds. We learned about water conservation and spread hay over our beds to…
Riverside Garden loves that sun!
At Riverside Dr. Charter we are starting with the basics in each class. The first rotation began the year in an almost empty garden-which was great! we planted LOADS of beans to help bring nitrogen to our soil, sugar snap peas, and flowers. With the weather still being quite warm, we were not ready to…
This month at Gardner Elementary, we talked about the importance of composting and reducing our waste in the world and built a compost pile when they can easily be taken to create new things, new life. We learned about what native plants means and talked about the benefits and deficits of growing non-native plants in…
There was an abundance of fruit and now there’s an abundance of seeds to harvest at Arroyo Seco! Seeds can travel in multitudes of ways and we’re pretty certain that some birds or squirrels will be eating and defecating some of these seeds to start a garden in another place. But we were able to…
Our Mayberry students took this week to learn the parts of a plant, both the visible and invisible parts. Students put on their observation hats and with their notebooks into the garden to find the six basic parts of a plant. For our younger students, we used our bodies to demonstrate how a plant grows…
What is a watershed? Easy, if you are standing on the ground right now, just look down. You’re standing, and everyone is standing, in a watershed. A watershed is the area of land where all of the water that falls in it and drains off of it goes to a common outlet. Watersheds can be…
Calvert Elementary is located in Woodland Hills and this put their school close enough to the recent fires that we took our garden class indoors. I decided to test the savvy fifth grader’s research and presentation skills. I assigned groups different insects and animals and I allowed them to decide what they wanted to learn…
Become a member and get rewards
Our interdisciplinary curriculum provides youth opportunities to explore in an outdoor setting. We teach K-12 students everything from cooking skills to environmental stewardship and history to social justice. It is rooted in the principals of both place-based and experiential learning models. for the remainder of 2018, if you become a FLOWER member at $100 we…
I find it interesting that I can plan a lesson thoroughly, have an extensive list of Plan Bs in case things don’t go according to plan, and yet, I am still consistently surprised. This past week, I was teaching the Food Chain. Many of the older grades had already learned about the food chain, but…
There are many non profits out there. They all sound great. Why ENRICHLA? We are down to earth, no nonsense and hard working. We are irreverent and we are ambitious. We are like no other non-profit. Nobody here makes more than a school district custodian. ($38,000) Everybody gets their hands dirty. We are efficient. We…
Compost Relay at 6th Avenue Elementary 🙂
Before the holiday, one of our 4th grade classes learned about the ingredients to make great compost. We went over the 5 key ingredients desired for great compost: greens, browns, decomposers, air and water. After this, the students were split into 4 teams and had the task of gathering all the elements to make our…
Before the holiday, our kindergarten class at Weemes did a very special lesson about parts of a flower. We went over the four parts of a flower including the roots, stem, leaves and flower. After this, each student received their own flower. We slowly and delicately took our flowers apart as a class and each…
Getting organized at Taking the Reins
“How do we know when to harvest?” aaaah…. a hunch? a feel? it smells right? fruit’s the right size? Why don’t we make a harvest calendar! Pulling out the trusty UC Master Gardener Handbook and looking up the approximate harvest time for each of our plants. The girls are attentive! Also, though it is…
“Eeeeeewwwwwwwwww!” said ALC student. “What did I do?” said squirmy worm exposed to the sunlight. “Worms are amazing. Here, grab one and I’ll tell you about what they do” said Garden Ranger. “Their poop is really good for the plants and they create air pockets for roots. Worms are legit.” said other ALC student. ”…
Starting with the roots, we learn about Parts of a Plant from the ground up. Using our Garden Scientist skills, we first sketch and label our parts, including function. Then, we put our creative skills to the test and make our plants, with their four main parts, out of pipe cleaners. Once we…
Sprouts for the Sprouts at Mid-City’s Prescott
The 1st and 2nd graders of Mid-City’s Prescott School of Enriched Sciences (the sprouts, the 3rd, 4th and 5th graders are the seedlings…) watched these radish babies grow from seed to seedling and last week we discovered why root vegetables sometimes grow hugging each other…like these carrots… Once roots start to grow and grow under…
Stewardship at Taking the Reins
Every Sunday I teach at Taking the Reins, a non-profit dedicated to building their four core concepts: responsibility, confidence, teamwork and leadership to teen girls in LA. Last Sunday, our main lesson was on garden troubleshooting and land stewardship where we made a list of things to do when you walk into the garden: watch…
November brought a lot of garden clean up and debris to be composted. We also got some good food and paper scraps from a parent volunteer. So, with all of our plastic buckets filled up, we started adding them to our composting tumbler a/k/a “the soil factory”. The kids learned about ratio by determining how…
November brought a lot of garden clean up and debris to be composted. We also got some good food and paper scraps from a parent volunteer. So, with all of our plastic buckets filled up, we started adding them to the “soil factory”, a/k/a our composting tumbler. The kids learned about ratio by determining how…
Starting with the roots, we learn about Parts of a Plant from the ground up. Using our Garden Scientist skills, we first sketch and label our parts, including function. Then, we put our creative skills to the test and make our plants, with their four main parts, out of pipe cleaners. Once we…
One of the favorite parts of the day at Carson Gore Academy is adding coffee grounds to the compost pile! The deli across the street provides us a week’s worth of their used grounds, so there’s plenty to spread around. We’re still working on why brown coffee grounds are considered a “green” when we…
With Dia de los Muertos having just passed and the release of the movie Coco last year, most kids recognize marigolds–or maravillas in Spanish. (I quote the movie Coco, telling kids, “you know those yellow flowers, ‘I give you my blessing.’ Those flowers.”) They’re the focus of more than one gardening lesson. For one, marigolds…
Starting with the roots, we learn about Parts of a Plant from the ground up. Using our Garden Scientist skills, we first sketch and label our parts, including function. Then, we put our creative skills to the test and make our plants, with their four main parts, out of pipe cleaners. Once we…
Do you know what a watershed is? This lesson put the water and food cycle into a larger context, and together, each class added to a lifesize drawing of a watershed. Definition: An area or ridge of land that separates waters flowing to difference rivers, basins, or seas. We all started with a handout…
This week at St. Patrick’s School, the littles came out to learn all about the hard working and sometimes pesty creatures in the garden. We discussed the reason insects flock to gardens by using our three P’s, predators, pollinators and pests. The kids played an aphid and ladybug game of tag and helped me…
Hello again! Sherman Oaks is getting green, and red… yes red, because radishes are here! We just made our first harvest! To start, we based our experiment on questions like: “What the soil is made of?” “What grows in soil?” and “Who needs it in order to live?.” We started to work in different samples…
Hello everyone! This month we did tons of fun things! We started with some cool lessons about how a flower grows. We went through each part: roots, stem, leaves, and flower. Maybe after, we’ll go through a fruit. We also built our own colorful flower with some recycled paper and pom poms! And just not…
We’ve had a wonderful few weeks at Frank Del Olmo Elem. I’ve received a new rotation of students who were just as jazzed to be in the garden as the last rotation. After a few classes of clearing out summer beds and planting winter veggies, today we dug deep into the science of decomposition. Specifically,…
This week at Valley View Elementary the kids took advantage of the cool and crisp weather out in the garden. The first graders used their five senses to describe plants in their journals. They are wonderful little writers…my favorite descriptive word was “rumbly” to describe the texture of a leaf. Kinders learned about the…
The Jefferson school garden got a makeover this summer by the magic of EnrichLA. Over 10 new redwood planter boxes were installed along with a drip irrigation system, shade sail and chalkboard for the teaching space! I am so excited to be their new Garden Ranger, teaching garden classes once a week and maintaining all…
This month at Bryson, I’ve been emptying out the tumbler composter, so that kids can see decomposition at work as well as actively work the compost. Students have been turning the pile with a pitchfork to introduce oxygen to the pile and feeding the pile “Browns” and “greens.” After an initial watering, the compost has…
I had been looking for a way to introduce hands-on creativity during garden class. This week, at Utah St. Elementary, my lesson included teaching producers and consumers. Two of my classes consisted of ETK students or pre-preschoolers. We discussed what effect the sun has on plants, where plants draw their energy from, what eats plants…
Between Westlake (McArthur Park) and Downtown LA you’ll find Miguel Contreras Learning Complex, a high school made up of several ‘sub’ schools. One of them, the Academic Leadership Community or simply ALC. The after school garden group meets every Tuesday from 1:30-3PM in a small but oh so mighty garden overlooking downtown. From day one,…
Curious Yorkdale Bean Sprouts
First Graders are kinda like little bean seedlings, sprouting creativity and eager to learn, reaching for warm autumn sun, putting their roots deep into the soil, their embryo coat burst with curiosity of gardening germinating rainbow colors in pages of their garden journals. Utilizing their 5 senses, they listen to hummingbirds, two finger touch fuzzy…
It’s a pleasure to be back in the garden with Kester Elementary after a long summer away! So many treasures were awaiting us to explore, like a hiding watermelon, banana peppers, and a giant zucchini! A review of the Garden Rules, like respect for all living things, 2-finger touch, walking feet, asking before picking…
Our friends at KIPP Comienza had the opportunity to use all of their senses in the garden this month; to learn about and respect all critters that call the garden their home; and how the world around us affects the plants we grow. Students have been bringing their science journals to the garden space this…
Looking for friends or foes in the garden today. We came across hiding in the beautiful green foliage of the our tomatoes a hungry hungry caterpillar. Actually the tomato Hornworm camouflaged itself in the green foliage on the tomato leaves. Once the students found the ones the size of a thumb they searched and found…
Fried Green Tomatoes anyone?? Today we had to lay our tomato “tree” to rest… Upon learning the difference between determinate and interdeterminate plants, we got a chance to see the growth of a 4 month old interdeterminate tomato which was taking over the whole garden plot with it’s bushy and lush green leaves and unripe…
Summer took its toll on the Alta Loma garden. Vines died off, weeds piled up, and gargantuan rosemary bushes ate the sprinkler heads (thus the dead vines….). But the courtyard garden in the middle of the school was still inviting, especially after we gathered some wood tables and a discarded chalkboard under a friendly…
Students at Gardner put in great work in their experiments, observations, and presentations this month! The 5th graders made presentations on their nature boards with a map of the garden and fun facts about the animals and plants found in the garden. The 4th graders observed, learned, and made presentations on plants they were unfamiliar…
TIOH 1st grade students kicked off their garden classes learning how many plants are seasonal and we saw firsthand, that plants will die without water. We removed all plants that were dead or out of season and harvested some onions that were ready to come out to make room for new fall/winter plants. The 5th…
We’ve allowed our sunflowers to “cure” on the stalk, giving the appearance that there is no life left whatsoever. . A great giant sunflower head’s secrets are revealed once the dried petals and organic matter is peeled back and brushed away.. Lo and behold, a sequence of seeds which contain life to a new generation…
We harvested seeds [Bush beans] from our very own Van Ness garden that we allowed to go to seed. Learning about the anatomy of the seed, we talked about how a seed starts off with all that it needs in the seed itself to start out life: a seed coat, food storage and embryo or…
Fruits and vegetables come in a variety of colors. Eating as many colorful fruits and veggies is a challenge for students and adults. Colorful fruits and vegetables help prevent health issues and make the immune system stronger. Students learned that vegetables and fruits are classified into 5 colors: blue/ Purple, green, red, yellow/orange, white/brown. The color protects fruits…
October 16, 2018 was a big day at Hamlin Charter Academy. The irrigation system in the new garden has been successfully fine-tuned, and our seeds are starting to germinate in numbers to be proud of. It was thrilling to see the new seedlings emerge from the soil at last! Previously only a few peas had…
A visit from an ex first grader with her wonderful donation of flower and vegetable starts was a welcome surprise. Loretta Allison now a mother of a ten year old, grows vegetables and flowers in her home nursery and conducts easy to understand planting workshops at Artemesia Nursery in El Sereno. She teared up to…