Students worm their way to healthy soil
For children, learning about nutrition helps to set the foundation for a healthy lifestyle. When discussing nutrition, what better way to start, then to simply talk about food, which is the main focus of an exciting new program at Las Cruces Public Schools.
At Zia Middle School, Doña Ana Elementary School and Tombaugh Elementary School, students are in the process of building new school gardens, as part of their first year of edible education classes. Sierra Middle School, Valley View Elementary School, Conlee Elementary School, East Picacho Elementary, and Mayfield High School are already growing vegetables in existing school garden spaces.
These schools are part of La Semilla Food Center’s Edible Education Program, which works in partnership with LCPS Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education (SNAP-Ed) in the LCPS Nutrition Services department. These students have the unique opportunity to use produce from their school gardens and other local produce to prepare healthy recipes in monthly classroom cooking activities.
Through the Edible Education Program, teachers educate students about a variety of topics surrounding agriculture, culinary arts and nutrition, which shows the connection between growing, cooking and eating healthy foods. By understanding the seed to table cycle, students are able to explore not only where their food comes from, but how they use that food to create healthy meals. This exploration begins in the school garden where students plant vegetables from seed and care for them until they are ready for harvest. Students also learn about soil fertility and the importance of continuing the seed to table cycle by returning nutrients to the soil through composting.
A compost system is a habitat where nitrogen-rich materials are mixed with carbon-rich materials to be broken down and transformed into nutrient-rich soil for growing new plants. A fun and engaging way to teach the students about composting is to discuss the FBI-Fungi, Bacteria, and Invertebrates-which are the catalysts for the entire composting system that play an important role in growing nourishing foods.
There are different methods of composting which can be adapted to a variety of situations, based on availability of space and quantity of food waste. Students and teachers at Mayfield, East Picacho, Conlee and Valley View use large three-bin systems to build and maintain compost piles. At Doña Ana, Zia, and Tombaugh the students recently started small-scale composting projects using vermicompost bins, or worm compost. These bins rely on earthworms, called red wigglers, to breakdown food scraps and produce worm castings. Worm castings can then be added directly to garden beds, or be used to make compost tea, a liquid extract of compost that contains plant growth compounds, that adds both rich nutrients and microbial life to soil.
In both compost systems, students must consider what decomposers need to survive and thrive: air, water and food. To feed decomposers, a healthy compost bin needs a balance of “brown” and “green” material. The “brown” material is the carbon-rich fragments of dead plant materials like straw, wood chips, pecan shells, shredded paper, cardboard, dead leaves and pine needles. The “green” material is the nitrogen-rich fragments of living plant materials like green plant cuttings, vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, and outside of a school setting, manure. Students also help keep compost piles moist and occasionally turn the compost pile for aeration, to prevent a pile from turning anaerobic and stinky.
Composting in schools provides a wealth of learning opportunities for students as they practice building and maintaining a habitat for living organisms, engage in hands-on lessons about decomposition and nutrient recycling, and have the opportunity to practice sustainability, by reducing the amount of waste they send to landfills. All the while, students are creating a tangible and useful product that will continue to enrich their school gardens and produce nutritious foods that will nourish their growing bodies.
We’ve dedicated ourselves to soil health at La Semilla and believe that we can all be soil stewards. It’s critical for students to learn about the beauty and power that soil can have to help sustain life on this planet. Learning how to compost is just one way that our Edible Education Program fosters that stewardship.
Elizabeth Anichini, the edible education program manager for La Semilla Food Center, collaborates with the Nutrition Services Department and schools at LCPS. For more information or to learn more about requirements for developing a school garden, contact her at firstname.lastname@example.org.