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.
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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.
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Plant anatomy is slowly turning into my favorite lesson to teach and to learn from. Not only is this a great introduction to how our earth feeds us, but it’s also great in understanding why pollinators are so important. Hint, hint! without pollinators we would struggle to feed ourselves – either directly or indirectly. We…
Last week, the kids worked on plant anatomy and discussed plant reproduction. It can be hard to conceptualize multiple types of plant reproduction but sometimes we need to ground our lessons in something tangible. This week, we’re working on apple anatomy. It’s great to break down the parts of an apple and look at the…
Welcome back Micheltorena! It’s great to connect with the kids, teachers and parents for another year. I’m pumped to talk about plant life cycle. Last year, we started so many seedlings, some made it and some didn’t – but since our classes are 6 weeks, some kids weren’t able to see how successful their crops…
Cherry Picking in the Jefferson Garden!
It was so great to be back in Jefferson’s school garden with the students. We found some great surprises during our walk-through, and discussed all the ways the garden changed over summer. The garden was waiting with an amazing Welcome Back to School surprise!! These Catalina cherries are from the CA Native area of our…
Mid City Prescott – Week 13
Hi Gardeners! Another week has gone by, and right before the official start of the summer we’ve had our 2nd harvest since we started with the farm. Our zucchini plants keep on thriving, it takes these shoots about 3 – 4 weeks to get to that size/weight. (12 – 18 inches long and around 4…
Mid City Prescott – Week 12
BIG NEWS! (at least for us). Really excited for our latest additions to our farm! The EnrichLA team paid us a visit, bringing a welcoming storage box to the entrance of the garden. They also brought lots of hay to cover our paths, we’ve had to mow too often since it got sunnier and with…
The time has come to wrap up the school year at Frank Del Olmo, which means we get to harvest, plant and celebrate! We dug up the rest of our carrots, and found some great shapes that had been hiding underground. We also took advantage of the abundant flowers to make some flower presses. During a…
Seed Harvesting at 3rd Street Elementary
As we wrap up a spring season and move into the summer months, there are many plants that had wonderful seeds to harvest . At 3rd Street Elementary , we discovered this month about how seeds disperse and the importance of building an heirloom collection. We then harvested dried sugar snap pea & arugula seeds…
Wiggly and Ziggly: Worm friends at Mid City
Our 2nd graders had a blast this month learning all about worms! We learned about their bodies, what they eat and how they contribute to the soil. We then observed a few worms up close and personal (with a couple students naming their new friends “Wiggly & Ziggly”). We then went into the garden and…
Painting Party at Weemes Elementary
It has been a great year at Weemes Elementary and to cap off an awesome gardening year, some parent volunteers and staff helped to repaint our wooden fence lining the edible garden. We chose a bright grass green and on our last day of class students during class and lunch came and painted inspirational artwork…
MCP Weeks 10 & 11 – 1st harvest!
Hey gardeners, Greetings from Mid City Prescott Middle School! Felt like starting the post with a landscape shot of our garden around 5PM, the senior trees are thriving and providing more shade than wished for, specially with weather being overcast and humid these past weeks. It will be quite helpful in a few weeks when…
Audubon M.S meets EnrichLA!
Hello folks, This is a happier post than usual, because is always amazing news when new schools come aboard with a gardening project for their campuses. One of our latest additions is Audubon Middle School, where we have adapted an area right next to a building for 6 raised beds. We have 3 citrus trees:…
West Vernon Elementary bug detectives
Detectives on the Case Students at West Vernon remove their garden gloves and put on their detective hats this week. The case? We’re looking for bugs, and the only way to find them are the clues they leave behind. Are these bugs friends or foes? How can we tell the difference? What do each of…
“What’s the Soil Story?” at 6th Avenue
May was a great month at 6th Avenue! Our 5th graders got down and dirty to learn about Soil Conversation. We learned about about ways to conserve our soil including rotating certain crops, adding soil amendments and planting natives. We then did soil tests of our garden bed soil to see if we have a…
No words could be more delightful to a Garden Ranger than “I love kale!” Most of the kids found out it was worth a try and now they can’t get enough of it! Since we can’t meet the demand with our current supplies, more kale will have to be planted next year. Especially the purple…
Angeles: All classes back for a week!
Hola, After a big harvest at Angeles Mesa, we have started getting our beds ready for summer! On our last harvest our 2nd graders helped out gathering up 15-20 lbs of red beets! And also lots of yellow chard, rosemary, strawberries and lettuces. The only two crops that will stay for the summer are…
We ended our cycle and year this week with a wonderful worm session! I had the fortune of bringing in large red worms this cycle and the it really surprised everyone! While the students were very engaged not many of the teachers and their aides wanted to get too close to the worms. Students and…
As the year draws to a close, our kindergarten Calvert’s chipped-in on the weeding, harvesting and cleaning! Together we discussed how to identify weeds, and why in fact we consider these plants weeds. I asked students to then identify weeds themselves and reminded them these are not our edible plants. Once we had that covered…
Last week at St. Patrick’s school the younger grades harvested and dried tons of mint leaves for making a Mother’s Day gift of mint tea! The kids carefully crushed the dried mint into the tea bags and decorated their little packets beautifully. The smell was intoxicating. The middle schoolers had worked so hard…
MCP Week 8 – Encountering new challenges
Gardeners, here are the updates on Mid City Prescott Farm as we’ve had some cloudy days the past days. After giving a few more days to the seeds that were planted with the students before we filled up all beds with soil, I decided to finally plant some fresh stuff, and since the weather has…
For the first time ever at Yorkdale Elementary School, TK and Kindergarten classes experimented with watercolors to paint their favorite fruit or vegetable in the garden. This class was especially inspiring for children to express their creativity while creating gorgeous Still Life art pieces. Teachers were thrilled letting me know these paintings will go home…
Some Invited Friends at Carson Gore Academy
During our lesson on friends and foes, our assessment of the garden revealed a few aphids, a lot of ants and no ladybugs! (or earthworms, but that’s for another blog….) Since too many ants will chase the ladybugs away, we needed to bring in some reinforcements. So, the following week, the classes remedied the problem…
Week 7 – Reporting from MCP Farm
Hello gardeners, we’ll pick up where we left on last week’s post about our Pepper plants at the Mid City Prescott Farm. It’s been 6 weeks since we planted those seedlings and unfortunately they are not thriving as everything else is at the garden. If we could make one exception, it would be the red…
Hamlin Charter Elementary’s Garden has grown since we started last September! Here are before and after photos of the same section of the garden. We started out with a few marigold seedlings, and now we have cabbage, kale, turnips, radishes, peas, and potatoes. This week we saw an artichoke and tomatoes forming. We even have…
Soil texture is a difficult topic to get across to 1st Graders, so we focus on touching samples of each size of soil particles. Silt is soft, sand is rough, and clay is sticky. We make soil ribbons by squeezing the soil sample in the palm of our hand to find out which type of…
This rotation, the 3rd graders at Tulsa had their first exposure to the garden! We also had some unexpected guests show up for class… Because this was the students first time in the garden space, we started off with the basics. Week 1 we learned all about soil- what it’s made of, what it’s good for,…
Pruining and weeding on these first weeks of flowering
Hello Hello! Mid City Prescott’s school farm is thriving! Our latest gardening action has consisted on lots and lots of weeding around our row beds, grass is doing just as well as our crops. I think rather sooner than later, we will get some mulch to lay around most of our rows. Before and after…
The Pre-K students loved roaming the garden and searching for good bugs and bad bugs. I gave them pictures of different items in the garden, like a “flower” or a “green leaf” or a “ladybug” and they had to search the garden for that item. They were so excited when they found it. They loved…
The 3rd graders had a lesson on what a balanced plate should look like at every meal. We talked about the 5 food groups: fruits and vegetables, grains, proteins, calcium items, and fats and sugars. I passed out pictures of different food items to the class and the students had to figure out which food…
There were a ton of aphids swarming around the kale, broccoli, and tomatoes at Arroyo Seco. So we thought what can we do to get rid of them? We tried to spray neem oil on the them. It worked on the plants that didn’t have too many aphids. Then we thought, “let’s get some ladybugs!”…
Harvest Time at Vine
Changing of the seasons also means harvest time! Vine students got to harvest a bunch of root veggies and leafy greens. The carrots we harvested were the sweetest we have ever tasted! The potatoes we delicious too. We had roasted potatoes with kale and onions spiced up with salt, garlic powder, crushed red peppers, and…
Thanks to a generous grant from the LA Kings and Enrich LA, the King garden just had a massive makeover! Enrich LA staff, volunteers from the LA Kings, and students from the school worked together to add new beds, a new irrigation system, a sink and new teaching area, plus paint and redo the…
Our second to last garden session ended this week with a lesson on cover crops and a feast. The second and third graders learned that soil needs recharging just like people do! By planting cover crops, (buckwheat in this case) we not only add nutrients back into our garden soil, but we also attract…
Six new raised beds and and a few citrus trees transformed the cement quad at Queen Anne Elementary into a productive garden space. The kids examined the irrigation system and determined where the plants need to be placed in order to get regular water. Then they dug out a small piece of native, hardened…
Soil Types + Veggie Tacos at 3rd Street: This month at 3rd Street, we did some digging in our beds exploring The Soil Types. We learned about the different types of soil including sand, silt and clay and then went into the garden with magnifying classes and looked up close at soil samples to determine…
Garden Jeopardy at Weemes: This month at the end of our 2nd grade class, we combined all our lessons for a review game of Garden Jeopardy. Students were competing for the prize of honorable mammoth sunflower seeds 🙂 Our four categories included: Fruits & Veggies, General Garden Knowledge, Worms and Soil. Some example questions for…
Sherman Oaks report: Red cabbage was the main ingredient. They grew up explendit. Aroung 10 cabbages we tasted. Beets were at the second choice, 8 beets. with and amazing color: Chioggia (Bassano) Beet. Sweet, stripped patterns. Also the leaves were tasty. …
Our garden is a open space to welcome everyone and everything. From the smallest creature on earth to humans. Every single thing on our garden is shared and appreciated by our eyes and for them. The insects. We explained and observed (very important one) our friends in the garden. We studying them very close. We…
Spring is here and all our friends are coming back, On our lesson, we talked about how important is to respect and give some space to our little friends because they are helping so much this world, and the flowers need them. I hope you guess already of whom I am talking about. Our friends…
Rio vista report: We started the month transplating the tomatoes, squash, watermelon and zucchini seedlings. Tomatoes are good companions plants(they like to grow next to each other) for the carrots, basil and peppers. Each of them with a separation of 12 inches. The choose of where to plant them was based on their “taste” of…
Mid City Prescott – Post Spring Break Maintenance
Hey gardeners, back to school after spring break! Impressed by how much all of our cucurbitaceae crops grew over the past 2 weeks. After figuring out the irrigation system at the beginning of the project, the plants have really settled and are growing healthy. Tomatoes and zucchinis have started to flower, the same for all…
Welcoming Kinder GARDENERS at West Vernon!
West Vernon’s tiniest hands helping in the garden West Vernon is welcoming TK and Kinder classes to the garden for their first time. In this rotation we will review seasons and weather, bugs, trees and seeds and we can’t wait to get started! Our Day 1 was focused on exploring the garden, smelling all the…
Earth Week at Multnomah Elementary!
The 1st graders at Multnomah Elementary were fired up for Earth Week! In addition to cleaning up trash around the school, the students decorated terracotta pots with Earth themed pictures. The students were encouraged to draw things they loved the most about the garden and of course, a picture of the Earth! We snacked on kale…
Angeles Mesa Elementary – Little rangers at garden
Spring is here and the 4th graders at Angeles Mesa Elementary have completed Unit 1, we are now engaging again with 3rd graders who have been at the garden when they were in 1st grade, however they wanted a refresher and so far with talked about soil and all garden guests and visitors (Friends &…
Compost Relay + Parts of A Flower at 6th Avenue
With our new compost kit arriving at 6th Avenue, students have been curious about how to use it and what it does to help the garden. Last week we talked in depth about composting and went over the additions we must have (greens, browns, de-composers, water & air) to make a compost pile effective. We…
Imagery in the Garden + Seed Balls at Mid City Prescott
This month at Mid-City Prescott, we discussed the word “Imagery” and how we can describe imagery in the garden. Students walked around our beautiful garden and then wrote haikus or free-form poems to describe what they saw growing. Here are a few samples of some their poems 🙂 We also did the lesson “Native…
In March, TIOH students became competing chefs. We took spring/summer fruits and vegetables to create a dish. Each group of students wrote a recipe Top Chef style! They were given specific ingredients to choose from and they had to come up with a recipe, measurements and all, to feed 31 people. They, then, chose the…
In March, Vine St students created serious solutions to reducing waste. Recycling, reducing, and reusing doesn’t only mean using the blue bins in our backyard (which we absolutely should). We can also donate clothes, shoes, toys, and lots of other things. We can take plastic water bottles and make them into planters. We can buy…
In March, Gardner scientists took Masaru Emoto’s water crystal experiment and started a plant experiment. They had six different studies running at once. The experiments as follows: Plants that receive positive words Plants that receive negative words Plants that is in the sun but gets no water Plants that receive water but no sunlight Plants that are…
Who thinks are gross? Not us! Worms have five hearts, are blind, and have no noses but who else makes the best compost with little fuss? In March, Arroyo Seco learned about worms, what they like to eat, and about vermicompost. It’s easy to build a vermicompost. You can buy a plastic bin, makes hole…
The garden at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Downey is doing great! There is a variety of seedlings growing and students continue to help with composting.
Flowers, Flowers, everywhere!
Spring is (definitely) here! Well, “spring”– it was quite hot in DTLA for the last few weeks. Our class with Academy Leadership Community (ALC) at Miguel Contreras Learning Complex is in the early afternoon so we can feel that heat! Of course, these kind of things are always a good opportunity for learning and teaching–…
Mid City Prescott – April 9th and 17th: More planting, prepping, pruning + GRUBS!
Hola! Spring break 2019 is here for LAUSD, and at MCP we are excited and ready for all the crops to start thriving within the next few weeks. This week decided to spent two days at the (coolest) school farm since won’t access to it next week. Efforts were dedicated to ensure the correct operation…
Carson Gore Academy hasn’t had a tumbler up until now, but we’ve still been going over the fundamentals of composting. The kids were eager to get started and our new green pails have been employed to help keep things separated. Banana peels and apple cores from breakfast are being brought to the garden by the…
The more we compost, the more “texture” get in our edible garden at home. https://web.extension.illinois.edu/homecompost/benefits.cfm “Incorporating compost into soil dramatically improves soil structure. Soil structure refers to how inorganic particles (sand, silt, clay) combine with decayed organic particles (compost, humus). Soil with good structure has a crumbly texture, drains well, retains some moisture, and is…
This Los Angeles version of spring is upon us, preemptively sending lettuces to bolt, premature marigolds to flower, and beans to pack-it-in. We’ve sadly had to watch (and taste) our super sweet snap peas go from juicy candy to cellulose-y seed bombs, but behold!—our leafy greens—rainbow chard, lacinato kale, and purple kale have become…
Longer days mean that here in Los Angeles we have officially switched over from one planting season to the next. For my veteran students there is no question as to what changes are taking place out in the garden! They know that flowering plants mean it’s time to take note and start saving those seeds.…
We loooooove exploring creatures in our garden and when the kindergarteners come out the first thing the want to look for are….bugs!!! So naturally, our inclination is to properly explain the delicate ecosystem that is existing in our very own school garden. The three Ps are easy to break down! Pests, pollinators and predators…
At Primary Academy we enjoyed all the six parts of the plants and learned how to spell them as well! You have to be creative in the garden. It is easy to think of your favorite edible treat in the garden, but is it easy to identify what part of the plant it belongs to?…
Micheltorena’s garden has gone through a lot of changes in two months. We had a full-on winter garden, where we grew herbs, celery, carrots and lettuce. Then we had so much water that some of our seeds didn’t sprout, it was a challenging time because we couldn’t get the seeds to germinate due to the…
I recently started working at Toluca Lake and I have to say, aside from the kids and staff being so wonderful they really are inquisitive. I’ve been challenging the kids with some lessons that I initially thought were out of their scope and boy, did they prove me wrong in the best ways! We wanted…
During the beginning of this year, we had some pretty big goals. The first to increase our composting and second to start recycling at the lunch line. I think for a minute everyone agreed we were all crazy for attempting to change the automated culture of disposing our food. Composting in theory is wonderful, but…
Glenfeliz Elementary School under the leadership of Principal Karen Sulahian and Tahereh Sheerazie, Garden Ranger and a dedicated faculty not only started a composting program but asked enrichla to expand the composting facilities to make room for more. This school and it’s students are an example to us all. More than 50 percent of garbage in…
A Taste of Garden
This week for our final kindergarten classes we talked about the different parts of plants and then had tastings of various parts of plants that we eat. We ate carrot roots, celery stems, broccoli flowers, and spinach and Swiss chard leaves. Most of us liked carrots, celery and the leafy greens, but broccoli seems to…
This week the 5th Grade at Hamlin Charter finished their maps of their garden beds. This not only teaches them mapping skills but they also have to identify what vegetables are already growing in their bed. Then both 5th Grade and the PALS classes used seed starting pellets to plant a variety of seeds, including…
At Lassen Elementary the 2nd Grade learned three ways to plant a garden—1) Planting seeds directly in the ground, 2) Buying seedlings at the store, and 3) Planting seeds in seed pellets and then transplanting the seedlings we grew ourselves into our garden beds. We planted cantaloupe and hot pepper seeds in individual seed pellets.…
Kindergarten students need plenty of time for garden exploration. With simple instructions to touch different areas of garden soil gently, they began to make observations. Look at these kiddos! There must be something super interesting under the picnic benches! The students discovered the soil is different in the pathways. “It’s really hard” they said. We…
What better way to learn about the parts of a plant and their function, then to actually handle a living baby plant! Aspire students did just that! Later we had a taste of their favorite garden food, kale with a splash of Tajín!
Cheers to a wonderfully wet winter! Last week in the Frank Del Olmo garden we celebrated the end of a fantastic six week session. Flowers are blooming all around, and the root veggies are splendid and plump. I hosted a spring time tea party for my students, as a w ay to show our appreciation for…
WE ARE TRYING A LARGER SCALE PLANTING AT THIS SITE Tomas And over to David! And off we go at Mid City Prescott Middle School! After a few days of planning, designing and creating the new gardening rows, we have now planted what will be our first crops of the season. The school has…
Worms are fascinating creatures. The kids love to explore a functioning worm ecosystem because not only do they find evidence of worms reproducing, they discover there are other creatures that share and benefit from the same environment. The kids love the book “Wiggling Worms at Work”. It explains so much about the worms life cycle.…
The end of the session is a great opportunity to learn how to harvest, prepare and enjoy great fruits and vegetables straight from the garden. Various kales, radishes and chives were harvest then cut into tiny pieces. We made an orange dressing that everyone loved and the students wrote down the recipe to share with…
This beautiful garden is pack full of citrus trees that are producing wonderfully. So why not teach the kids about the world of citrus! First we discussed shape, color and texture. Then the students drew the different types of citrus fruit. Lastly, we tasted the different varieties. Some were sweet and others very sour…those tart…
The first day of a new rotation are always so fun! This month it’s kindergarten’s turn in the garden and this group is full of questions! They explored the garden pointing and asking great questions along the way. “Are the orange ladybugs poisonous?” “Is that a tomato?” ”Why are the roly-poly’s eating the strawberry!?” ”What…
Thinking ahead is important when taking care of a garden if you want to have a continuous harvest. Today we harvested lots of beautiful lettuce then scattered some lettuce seeds to ensure we would have an ongoing supply The students were amazed that one seed holds all that is necessary to grow into a head…