Ultimate Garden takes lots of planning AND planting

The greenhouse at CPCC's Cato Campus

Putting together the Ultimate Schoolyard Garden takes many skills, thousands of hours of work, and a lot of plants – Perhaps 6,000 plus extras, just in case, estimates Annie West, a senior horticulture instructor at CPCC.
 “Stuff happens,” explains West, who with fellow horticulturalist Kaiti O’Donnell is overseeing plant production for the schoolyard garden display at next February’s Southern Spring Home & Garden Show. Visitors will see a fishpond, hydroponics, chickens, composting, bees, water reuse and thousands of plants from broccoli to sunflowers that normally don’t grow here in February.

Our goal: Planting the seeds of schoolyard gardening

The goal of the Ultimate Schoolyard Garden is to show area educators, garden enthusiasts or beginning gardeners ways to connect schoolyard gardening to curriculum from pre-K through High School and to show that every subject being taught can be enhanced through hands-on learning within the schoolyard garden.
The Ultimate Schoolyard Garden display will include plants common to local vegetable gardens and the nearly 100 schoolyard gardens that have been created in recent years to augment classroom instruction at area schools. There also will be an international area featuring plants common in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The garden plants will be joined by native plants, trees and shrubs and be incorporated into a recycled pallet structure being assembled by CPCC Harper Campus.

Timing is almost everything

That achievement requires planning, timing and facilities that can create spring growing conditions in the winter.
It sounds complex, but it’s really a matter of doing the math and providing the right growing conditions, Annie says. “So if I can get an eggplant to grow and produce a crop for me to harvest in 60 days, I start with that and work backward.” Then you find a way to create the growing environment that eggplants prefer.

Four educational gardens helping produce the plants

Four area educational facilities with greenhouses will do the growing: the horticulture programs at North Mecklenburg High School and CPCC’s Cato Campus, plus two unique facilities that incorporate horticulture in their programs: LIFESPAN (serving children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities) and Holy Angels (providing specialized, round-the-clock care for children and adults with intellectual developmental disabilities and delicate medical conditions).
If all goes well, visitors to the Ultimate Schoolyard Garden will a cornucopia of food-producing plants that our children can grow and learn from at school and, for that matter, at home.
And if not – if an ice storm kills the power at one of the greenhouses, for instance, or some plants don’t mature as fast as the gardeners had hoped – then what?
“If it’s close, no one will know,” says the veteran horticulturalist. “Gardening is like Christmas: What “Santa brings is what you get.”

Can you sponsor or volunteer?

As you can tell, this project needs extensive sponsorship and many volunteer hands between now and February. To learn more about how you can help, visit our GARDEN SPONSORSHIP WEBPAGE, where you can also download a detailed packet of materials. You can also EMAIL Edna Chirico, Executive Director of the Catawba River District, or call her at 704-562-8847.

Learn more

The Southern Spring Home & Garden Show will take place Feb. 21-23 and Feb. 28-March 2 at the Park Expo and Conference Center in Charlotte.
• Learn more about the Home & Garden Show at Southernshows.com.
• Learn more about the Ultimate Schoolyard Garden at catawbariverdistrict.org.