INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — Peter Sutherland, who has a great South African accent and a passion for gardening, is leading a Pelican Island Audubon Society effort to install innovative mini-gardens at all 29 schools in the Indian River County system to help children connect with nature and teach them how to grow their own food.
The planned 4-foot by 4-foot raised bed gardens are modeled on the teaching of Mel Bartholomew, author of “Square Foot Gardening,” which sold more than 800,000 copies, and “All New Square Foot Gardening.”
The books explain an easy, convenient method of growing vegetables that is five times more productive and much more eco-friendly than traditional row gardening, according to Bartholomew and Sutherland.
“Students will grow their own vegetables outdoors in a way that saves water, avoids excessive fertilizer and illustrates the benefits of a healthy diet,” according to the Audubon Society. “Students will learn that gardening saves energy by decreasing food transportation costs, and uses land – their backyards – more productively than typical lawns and that vegetable gardens create plant diversity and help reduce global warming by absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen.
“I hope the children will develop an empathy with environment,” says Sutherland, a chemical engineer who moved to the United States from South Africa to work in the gold mining industry in Colorado and later owned a farm near Chesapeake Bay before moving to Vero Beach 12 years ago.
Multiple studies have shown children spend less and less time out in the natural world, observing and interacting with plants and animals, weather and changing seasons, and that the growing nature deficit negatively impacts their physical and mental health.
Bonnie Swanson, principle of Vero Beach Elementary School, one of the first schools where the program will be introduced, has an additional goal for the garden besides helping children tap into the healing wonder of nature and understand their connectively with the world around them.
“We have many hungry children in Indian River County,” Swanson says. “It seems strange with all the wealth here, but we have kids who go home to no electricity, no food, and no water. We are hoping children and parents learn they can sustain themselves by growing their own food, even if they live in an apartment.”
Swanson’s desire to teach children and families the most essential of survival skills jibes with the goal of Bartholomew’s Square Foot Gardening Foundation, a non-profit entity dedicated to ending world hunger by teaching families how to grow healthy food for their daily meals.
The local program is paid for with a $9,890 grant from TogetherGreen, an initiative of the National Audubon Society and Toyota launched in 2008 to foster diverse environmental leadership and fund innovative conservation ideas. So far, TogetherGreen has given $.5.5 million to more than 200 projects nationwide.
“We were scratching our heads for ideas to attract some of the Together- Green grant money,” says Sutherland, a member of the Pelican Island Audubon Society board. “The light bulb went on in my head for this project last February at Gardenfest in Riverside Park when I visited the Square Foot Garden Foundation’s booth. I am a keen gardener and I have had Bartholomew’s book for 30 years and so I tossed the idea out at board meeting.”
When the grant was awarded to the local Audubon chapter, Sutherland went to work with fellow board member Bill Loftus and Audubon member Dr. Graham Cox to implement the program.
He says the grant will fund a garden – complete with trowel and watering can – for each school in the district and hopes to have the first gardens in by the end of the month.
Building a garden is simple. Two 8-foot 2×8 boards are cut in half; the four pieces are then screwed together to make the 4-foot x 4-foot frame, which gets a mesh bottom.
The frame is filled with a blend of peat moss, mulch and vermiculate and divided by a grid into 1-square-foot sections.
A different type of plant is grown in each section with synergistic plants placed in adjacent sections.
Once a section is harvested, a different kind of plant goes in that spot in a beneficial sequence Bartholomew has devised.
There is no digging or weeding, seed and fertilizer are used sparingly, and because the beds are small and raised, there is less bending over and no awkward stretching to tend plants.
Swanson has reserved a large section of lawn adjacent to her school’s science lab and nutrition kitchen, where children learn to prepare healthy meals, for a complex of the mini gardens, which she envisions as major sources of food for her students.
Sutherland hopes to expand the program as rapidly as momentum allows, pulling volunteers from the Audubon Society and Garden Club of Indian River County to work with students and teachers.
Given children’s innate creativity and fascination with nature when they are exposed to it, Swanson and Sutherland expect the child-sized gardens to be a big hit with kids.
Sutherland hopes to draw in math students as well as the horticulturally inclined, calling on children to calculate and keep records of the amount of soil and water used in each bed, the time from planting to harvesting and the yield of vegetables from each carefully tended square foot of garden.
“The Audubon Society is wonderful,” says Swanson. “We are very excited to have this program at our school.”
