Well before the idea for The Mobile Garden came along, I involved myself in a more traditional class garden--one that had a plastic bottle greenhouse as its central feature. While doing my student teaching in a first grade classroom, I made classroom gardening a central part of my curriculum. In mid January, the idea of building a greenhouse was very appealing as it would allow us to move gardening activities outdoors a full month earlier.
While researching what design would best suit our class, I became fascinated with the idea of building a greenhouse built out of 2 liter plastic bottles. I had seen such a design built at The National Botanic Garden of Wales as part of a recycling exposition. A greenhouse of this kind had many attributes: - It would be very inexpensive.
- The school was across the street from our greatest source of material, the dump.
- The project would galvanize both parents and students alike as they would help in its building.
- The greenhouse would be a powerful symbol of both recycling and gardening at the school.
It took 2 months to build and ended up using some 1300 two liter bottles. As far as I know, this is the first one to be built in the U.S. Also, notice the square foot gardening beds that went in as well. We ended up having six 3x3 beds altogether. A local television crew came out for the class garden christening party and did a fair job of documenting the event. Needless to say, the kids were thrilled to make it on television. Here's the link for that:
COMING SOON........
- THE INSPIRATION FOR CONTAINER GARDENING
- EVIDENCE SUPPORTING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SCHOOL GARDENING
- OTHER SUCCESSFUL SCHOOL GARDENING PROGRAMS AROUND THE WORLD
- IDEAS FOR IMPLEMENTING THE MOBILE PROGRAM
- AND MANY OTHER THINGS THAT CURRENTLY ESCAPE MY MIND.............
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