ZEELAND TWP. — A new garden space coming to Woodbridge Elementary this spring will help supplement student learning while providing fresh produce to the school and community.
Students in Bill Boerman’s class at Woodbridge have been working since the fall to design and build a garden, featuring a handful of beds for planting produce, a pumpkin patch and more, on the school grounds.
“We’re trying to make a garden so that we have fresh produce,” student Tyler Black said. “We’re tilling an area for pumpkins, we’re going to make more beds, we’re making a fence, we’re making a storage shed.
“We still have a lot of work, but I think it will be good once we’re done. It’s going to be fun.”
Boerman said the project will have educational and nutritional benefits, both for the school and the greater community.
“Educationally speaking, we’ve got a variety of science, nutrition and language arts lessons that tie into this,” he said. “Then, nutritionally, we’ve got teams of students that work using these ‘garden-to-plate’ food options.”
Boerman said students throughout the building will be able to use the garden to support various lessons. Some produce from the garden will be harvested and donated to community organizations, in addition to the community being welcomed to harvest in the summertime.
The project started earlier this school year, with students designing and building a couple of prototype garden beds to find a model they wanted to use. It took a step forward Monday, April 8, when staff members from Zeeland Board of Public Works visited the school to install a tap well to supply water for the garden.
On April 22 — Earth Day — students will work to build five more beds for the garden and then plant their seedlings at the school. Students have worked with an Environmental Science class at the Careerline Tech Center to get their seedlings started.
“Two weeks from (Monday) we’ll be working on building the other five beds, putting up the fencing,” Boerman said. “We currently are working with the Careerline Tech Center, kids went out there five or six weeks ago to plant seedlings.
“Two weeks from now we’ll be building in the morning and in the afternoon we’ll be moving a whole lot of dirt and getting a whole bunch of seeds and seedlings planted as well.”
Student Ozwin Gillean said building the rest of the garden beds will be a big task.
“I’m looking forward to building all of those, but it’s going to be a lot of work,” Gillean said. “Only those two (prototypes), cutting all the wood and building it, that took over half the day. Building all this is going to take a while.”
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Gillean, Black, Emily Winter and Ela Atwell said some skills they’ve learned in the process include working as a team, taking good notes, being patient with each other and having a firm plan before taking action to avoid mistakes.
Community partners in the project include Zeeland BWP and Broadview Engineering.
“Different community stakeholders have come in to teach, train and work with the kids on different aspects of the process,” Boerman said.
— Contact reporter Mitchell Boatman at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Woodbridge Elementary students building garden to benefit community