Tag Archives: Cambridge

Many hands grow Cambridge Elementary School’s new garden

image of school garden

Cambridge News & Deerfield Independent: A large new garden is rising at the edge of a woods at Cambridge Elementary School. It will be a place to play with science, eat new things and dig in the dirt, say those who have worked for more than a year to get it built.

A lot of Cambridge-area adults and kids have had – and will continue to have — a hand in its creation and inaugural season.

Inside the Blue Jay Garden’s picket fence, that will be painted next fall under the direction of CES art teacher Sarah Krajewski, 15 raised wooden beds are starting to fill with herbs and vegetables planted by students. The responsibility of caring for all that will shift in June as local day camp groups take over watering, weeding and picking. In the fall, students will finish the harvesting.

This week and last, CES students were setting early season plants under the watchful eye of Georgia Gomez-Ibanez, a longtime volunteer who coordinates the school’s environmental education program and who sits on its garden committee.

Unlike a prior garden at the back of the school that’s now abandoned, the new garden is in the thick of student activity. Principal Chris Holt said it’s intentionally steps from two playground areas and the school forest.

The old garden “felt hidden,” said Ben Timp, co-chair of Cambridge Farm to School and also a member of the garden committee.

The new garden’s back gate opens to the school forest trailhead, a shady space with benches and picnic tables for teachers to use as an outdoor classroom. Also steps away is a new prairie garden being relocated from elsewhere on the school grounds, and not far away is a pond where frogs are awakening in spring chorus.

Read the complete article on Cambridge’s school garden.