This is from member Mark Abraham who runs garden at The Will Rogers Learning Community:
“The Will Rogers Learning Community is an elementary school in the SMMUSD that today boasts a very large school garden. The nascent 2+ year garden is set up with 19 double reach rows for intensive crop production, composting bays, fruit trees, and more, to teach 500+ elementary school children who visit the garden each week the connection to good food, care for one another and care for the planet. Classroom time in the farm is interactive in nature and the students learn about regenerative agriculture, plant horticulture, propagation, insect identification, decomposers and fungal allies, and more. The garden is supported by a weekly crew of volunteers from the community who come to garden, share, learn and have fun every weekend to advance the mission of the school’s garden, to complement the work being done by the students each week and to help build out the infrastructure.
My intention among many others is to see to it that the site serves as a repository for important, endemic and/or rare germplasm – so that it can function as a lending library of sorts for the community when the time comes. I am grateful to the chapter for their interest in what we are doing; we have a lot of work ahead of us and it is my hope that as we grow the space we can learn from experienced horticulturalists like yourselves, and develop the connections and the necessary resources for our future fruit hunters. We are very excited to host you for the first event of the New Year – see you in 2023!
Garden is located at the corner of Maple and 16th Street in Santa Monica, 90405. Parking and water fountains on site. Bathrooms across the street at John Adams Middle School.”
Definitely a can’t-miss tour and certainly a focus for chapter volunteering.
Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash