Leschi Children’s Garden

Leschi Elementary’s school garden is ready for spring planting! On Sunday February 15th, we had a wonderful group of parent volunteers and two Leschi Community Council (LCC) members come together to prepare the garden for student education. Work included building a beautiful spiral herb garden, mixing in donated compost (from Cedar Grove) into soil, digging up existing lilac tree to create more room for planting, putting plastic cloches back up, transplanting herbs and cleaning up existing compost bin. The highlight of the work party was installing our “irrigation system” ollas. Here’s a picture of these beautiful urns. What a successful day! Thank you to all the parents and LCC for being there.

Outdoor Education will start back up the first week of March. With this warm winter upon us, spring feels like it’s already here. The other wonderful news is that Leschi Elementary has been awarded a $2000 grant from Whole Kids Foundation; $1500 of this will be used to fund a garden educator. The educator has already been “hired” and will start the first week of March and continue through August. Thank you, LCC, for being our community partner on the grant. Other collaborations include Green Plate Special and IslandWood. Both nonprofits will be providing volunteer outdoor educators to help teach garden and forestry to students of Leschi.

Since we are gearing up for planting, we could always use starts to help us get going. If you have any strawberries, herbs, kale and any other good spring season starts, please contact parent volunteer garden coordinator Kim Blakemore at kblakemo@uw.edu. We could always use volunteers interested in assisting our educators. Contact Kim if interested.

Thank you to our parents, school staff and teachers and to our surrounding community for making outdoor education possible at Leschi Elementary.

~Kim Blakemore