Not all play

I work. I promise. My most accomplished work so far is at the primary school where my environmental club has a pretty amazing (mostly organic) garden going on. I say “mostly” organic only because the seeds aren't certified organic and the soil has never been tested (and is suspiciously amazing soil). I haven’t let anyone add synthetic fertilizer or pesticides to the garden and it is doing well. It’s not growing as fast as they are used to seeing and there are more bugs, but everything looks healthy and nice.

Here are some grade 6 planting tomatoes.

 The plants are still little, but growing strong.

Here I am teaching them how to make a natural pesticide out of onion, garlic and hot pepper. It is much cheaper to use than the costly synthetic pesticide and much safer for the environment and people (I’m hoping they will take some info back to their parents ;))

 Besides the garden, I include projects and games (and once I got them all to write a haiku about the environment-adorably inspiring). These are in the process of becoming a hanging garden that will have flowers to attract bees.

Here I have them playing a relay race where they had to separate man-made garbage (non-biodegradable) from nature made (biodegradable). I had a tough time with this game and it’s going to take a lot more work to get them out of the habit of throwing garbage on the ground.