What’s Growing On is a place for our Battery Urban Farm teachers, parents, friends — and you! — to tell us all the cool stuff you’re doing to get growing in your school, home, neighborhood — wherever. It’s a chance for us all to share great ideas; to get inspired by each other; a chance for everyone to tell their story. What’s yours? 

What’s Growing On at PS/IS 276

At PS/IS 276 Battery Park City School we are growing leaders of sustainability.  Through school wide programming in gardening, recycling, composting, and tree care, we provide our students with authentic experiences in environmental leadership and responsibility.  We try to weave environmental themes into the curriculum as often as possible in order to connect traditional learning with participation in civic responsibilities.

Growing Food

Middle school Environmental Club members build a trellis for peas at Battery Urban Farm

From EarthBox planting in kindergarten and second grade to first grade visits to Battery Urban Farm to helping develop our new rooftop garden, our students participate in a lot of hands on gardening activities. Taking care of plants becomes a community building activity as well as a lesson in responsibility.  Second grader, G.G., learned that “plants don’t just grow. You need to take care of them by watering them and putting them outside to get special light.”

Students have the opportunity to work with and observe plants throughout their various life stages.  Middle school Environmental Club students maintain a plot at Battery Urban Farm throughout the fall and spring growing seasons.  They are a small, yet dedicated and adventurous group of urban farmers, who will eat anything directly out of the plot.  I have learned how important this experience is for them from our shared participation in the farm.  It opens up their eyes and their palates to new foods.  Charlie, a seventh grader, says that the Urban Farm helped him to “try a lot of new plants like beets—a new favorite. You can eat different parts of the plant, but I prefer the beet leaves over the roots.”

As kids growing up in the city, they rarely get to see where their food comes from.  Now, they are able to make connections between the food choices they make on a daily basis and the plants that they care for at the Urban Farm.  Seventh grader, Valerie summed up her gardening experience by saying, “we go to the supermarket and see all the things that come from the farm, but it’s much better when you plant it by yourself.  It’s more fun, and you get to experience the whole journey.”

With the help of dedicated parents and teachers, we have been working hard in the last two years to develop our roof garden space.  It is small, but we pack in a lot of kid-friendly veggies, herbs, and flowers.  Children have been an integral part in growing our roof garden.  They create art to number the beds, decide what to plant, sow seeds, control pests, harvest and enjoy.  We are currently growing a variety of edible plants including lettuces, turnips, beets, chard, onions, garlic, peppers, and tomatoes—just to name a few.

The 1st and 2nd grade Environmental Club makes signs to teach others about recycling.

Growing Respect for Resources

From our school’s beginnings, we have educated students about the importance of resource conservation and recycling efforts.  Our school recycles in the classrooms, offices, and cafeteria.  Students help by labeling recycling bins and garbage cans, creating posters, making school-wide announcements, and educating each other about recycling.  We have had support this semester from GrowNYC Recycling Champions.  They are helping us to make sure everyone in our school understands the hows and whys of recycling in New York City.  Some of our most dedicated Environmental Club students choose to spend their recess time helping others in the cafeteria as Recycling Monitors.  They stand by the bins at clean up time and remind students how to separate their waste.  “Sometimes people place stuff in wrong places.  If you could be better at recycling, the Earth can last longer.  Our resources would get replenished,” says Darious, seventh grade.

Not only are students learning to recycle properly, they are also beginning to understand how they can use their knowledge and experiences to positively change other people’s actions.  One of our fourth grade recycling monitors, Hanson, talked about how he can make changes.  “If people don’t protect the environment now it means they don’t care about the future—garbage, garbage, garbage, landfills, landfills, landfills, garbage trucks, garbage trucks, garbage trucks—the future would not be what people imagined. We could make a difference now; we could change basically our future and the world. We can make a difference.”

Growing Worms

We have been growing our compost program for four years.  Third grade classes and the science room have vermicompost (worm) bins.  Students are responsible for collecting food scraps like apple cores, strawberry tops, and banana peels at lunchtime and “feeding” them to the worms.  They observe the decomposition process then harvest their bin when it gets full.  Exploring the worm bin is a favorite activity.  There are so many things to discover—baby worms, egg sacks, left over bits of food, seeds, mites, and, of course, slimy and wiggly worms.

Last fall, we composted all the raised beds in our roof garden by layering food scraps (green materials) with dead leaves, straw, and newspaper (brown materials).  It’s called lasagna composting because you place the organic materials in layers.  We have recently started an outdoor compost tumbler in our garden space, and a group of second graders has been adding to it each day from their lunch scraps.  We can’t wait to use our outdoor compost in the garden, as well!

Growing Trees

Students work together to plant flowers in the street tree beds outside PS/IS 276

Last year, our school adopted the trees in front of our building through Million Trees NYC.  We are dedicated to taking care of our street trees and educating the community about how important these trees are to our neighborhood.  This spring, students of various ages laid compost and topsoil in the tree beds then planted flowers.  Kindergarten students made signs to discourage people from littering, climbing on the trees, stepping in the tree beds, and letting their dogs pee on them.  The students who participated learned about how to care for trees and why they are such an important resource, even those ones that are stuck in the middle of the sidewalk.

When asked what their favorite thing about Environmental Club is, the resounding response was “going outside!”  Our students love to be outside, enjoying, and relaxing in nature.  If they take anything from these lessons on sustainability, I hope that it is a love and respect for our natural environment that will guide them throughout their lives.

One day, these students will be the ones making important political, economic, and social decisions that will affect the world.  I hope that when they do, they’ll think back to their early days as urban farmers, recycling monitors, composters, and tree stewards to help them grow the next generation of sustainable leaders.

Juliana Germak teaches English as a Second Language and Environmental Education at PS/IS 276. She has been working to educate New York City students for a sustainable future for the past seven years.  She loves good food, especially when it’s local.  She travels all over the world searching for innovative environmental practices, culinary adventures, and the beauty of the natural world.