Important Dates! Mark your Calendars!

Do you want to learn more about McKinley's Farm to School program and school garden, Cultivating Curiosity? 

Well, mark your calendars for these upcoming events:

Farm to School Lunch

April 22nd, 11:00-12:30

McKinley Cafeteria

Salem-Keizer food service will be serving a locally sourced lunch to celebrate Earth Day and celebrate local producers and sustainable practices. Look for a menu and pricing in the next McKinley messages.

May (date to be determined)

Farm to School Lunch #2

This lunch will involve a partnership between a local chef and the Salem-Keizer food service.

Take this opportunity to come have lunch with your child, and support the Farm to School program and local producers.

June 3rd

Garden Celebration

Come and join us for an evening of local food (maybe even from the school garden!), music, and activities. A great opportunity for all of us to come together as a community to celebrate the effort, energy and passion people have put into making a school garden at McKinley a reality.

And After...

More pictures



What things looked like before




Before



Raised Beds Are In!

The Garden Build day on Saturday was a HUGE success!

 I showed up at noon with pizza thinking there would be lots of work left to do. Not so much. Nearly all the beds were installed, most were filled with dirt, and there was half a fence up. There was a conveyer belt of wheelbarrows full of dirt, shovelers, post-hole diggers, drill operators, bed levelers...amazing. Thad and Justin led the team of parents and students, Brenda the school garden coordinator for the district, and Mrs. Morton to the (near) completion of our first phase. Thank you thank you to everyone that came out to help get this project in the ground.

And thank you to all our community partners that have donated time and materials: Parr lumber for materials for the beds, Salem-Keizer School District for loads of tools and wheelbarrows, Marion-Polk Food Share for more tools, and Highway Fuel for a great discount on some great dirt!

If you get a chance, come see the work that's been done.

Look at all those kids ready to move some dirt!

 Here's our project manager Thad in action, lining up those fence posts. 

If you want to be involved in planting the beds and volunteering to help take kids into the garden after Spring Break, contact Kira. (dazz22@hotmail.com)

GARDEN BUILD DAY THIS SATURDAY!!

March 12th, Saturday

9:00 am to 3:00 pm

McKinley Garden Build Day

We have approval from the district to go ahead with Phase one!

Dirt will be delivered Friday afternoon, and Thad will be cutting up boards. Do you have a power drill and want to help? Contact Thad for more info on that.

Saturday morning will begin the first steps in creating a school garden at McKinley! After lots and lots of conversations, meetings, and more conversations, we are ploughing ahead. A big thank you to everyone involved. We have been able to move from just talking about a garden to really building one thanks to all your energy, time and support. The raised beds will be built, installed and filled with the parents, students and volunteers that show up on Saturday. We will also be installing a short fence to designate the garden area from the playground area.

There will be coffee, hot chocolate and donuts for our early morning workers. Pizza will come for the afternoon shift, with snacks and water in between to sustain the energy of our volunteers. There will be activities for school age kids when they get tired of shoveling and pushing wheel barrows. 

Come celebrate the McKinley School Community and what are energy and ideas can accomplish!

If you are planning on coming, and you have garden tools you could bring, these are some things we need:
wheel barrows                   shovels                        post hole diggers
brooms                             work gloves

Want to learn more about McKinley School Garden?

Silent Auction and Movie Night

Friday, March 4  6:00-8:00

The Garden committee will have an information table at the Silent Auction in the gym Friday night.  Come and see the conceptual design de Santis created and what the 1st phase will look like.

Pick up a "Cultivating Curiosity" sticker, a free packet of seeds, and sign up to help volunteer on the Garden Build Day, March 12th. There will be food for our dirt shovelers and wheel barrow-pushers, and activities for kids when they get tired of pulling ivy and hauling compost.

Come be a part of this exciting project!

Garden Build Day! Mark Your Calendars (Pending School District approval)

Garden Build Day--Phase 1

Saturday, March 12th

9:00 a.m.--3:00 p.m.-ish

(near the bike rack)

Are you handy with a power drill? 

Want to build up those biceps shoveling dirt? 

Feel like yanking up some invasive ivy?

We have a job for you!

            Come join us in the first phase of the McKinley School Garden! We will be building raised beds that will be installed and filled outside room four, near the bike rack, pending final district approval. We will also be removing ivy from several areas of the school grounds, in preparation for planting later in the year. 

         We will need help in preparing the site, hauling wheelbarrows of compost and topsoil, and construction of the raised beds. There will be an information table about Farm to School programs and the work the garden committee has done so far. There will be activities for kids, when they get tired of pushing wheelbarrows, shoveling dirt and pulling ivy. 

         If you have any of the following garden tools to loan, please let us know and bring them along:

wheelbarrows

shovels

trowels

electric drills

gardening gloves

March 12th! 

Come help Cultivate Curiosity!

Thank you Parr Lumber!

Parr Lumber has donated 2000 linear feet of material for McKinley to use in the School Garden.
Thank you Darryl for all your support and work for the garden project!

Now comes the fun part! Phase one of our school garden will include some raised beds outside of room 4. We are in the process of crossing our t's and dotting our i's and submitting all the paperwork necessary to move forward this Spring.

Stay tuned for updates and how to get involved!

ALSO--check out the new link to Oregon Department of Education's Farm to School site. Lots of information to get you thinking about school gardens and good food in the cafeteria.

ALSO--Several of us attended a meeting in at CREST, an environmental-science education program, in Wilsonville Jan. 12th. The talk was focused around resources to support school gardens, and how you connect the garden to classroom curriculum. There is a very large educational garden on-site, and they are doing some really interesting things with the grounds. Pictures to come!

MEETINGS THIS WEEK!

There is a Farm to School meeting on Jan. 12th in Wilsonville.  Representatives from several school districts that are pursuing farm to school programs and people from ODE will be there to share ideas, resources, etc. I''ll post an update of that later this week. It should be exciting to hear what others are doing as we slowly get started here at McKinley.

Next Garden Meeting!

Tuesday, January 18th 9:00am 

McKinley Media Center

We have decided to try and meet twice a month to help us stay on track with the goal of putting in some raised beds by this Spring. Our next meeting is the 18th. Hopefully we will have some sketches to look at and we can start searching out materials and donations we will need. Come join the discussion if you can.
I will work on getting dates up here in a more timely manner, as well as updates on what we've done or plan to do. Email or post a comment with suggestions or questions.

School Garden Committee

We are plowing ahead!--Caution! bad garden puns ahead--We have formed a garden committee to take on the work of getting something planted and in the ground for students to interact with and learn from this Spring. We are starting with building some raised beds.

 The committee is made up of 6 key roles:
Facilitator/Principal--handles the leadership and project management 
                                               of "the big picture"
Garden Coordinator--oversees the physical garden and takes the lead
                                              in design and planning
Planting Day Leader--promotes and coordinates site preparation, building
                                             and planting
Resource Leader--collects and distruibutes educational materials and writes
                                      articles when needed
Parent-Teacher Liason--Recruits parents and community members to help,
                                                   and keeps PTC informed
Fundraiser/PR Leader--Seeks funding to sustain the garden

Each role is shared by two or three people, so that we can really maximize our energy and enthusiasm and not overwhelm anyone. Sustainability is one of our goals! If you are interested in a particular aspect of the garden, and focusing your attention, expertise and energy, contact me (Kira). I would be happy to sign you up!