The Dry Garden: Teaching kids how to grow food the Farmscape way

Farmscape created kid-accessible planters with drip irrigation, helped to choose seeds, planted them, then came every week to weed, water and harvest plants from the planters and the hanging pouches.

By Emily Green
LA Times
March 11, 2011

Excerpt:

Farmscape services aren’t cheap. Depending on the size of the garden, installation of beds, irrigation, soil and the planting can run into the thousands of dollars. Follow-up visits from Farmscape staff run about $200 a week. So when the president of the parent-teacher organization of San Jose-Edison Academy, a West Covina charter school, got a grant from a local business, she worked to stretch the dollars.

Instead of having Farmscape build the beds, Maria Chavira organized a community build during which kids and their families turned out to piece the planters together, no tools required. The result is pictured above. Below, from left: Jon Bassett (standing) and Daniel Allen trim vegetables as students look on; Natalie Saavedra holds on to carrots; Alexia Alvarez, Isabella Acosta and Natalie watch the Farmscape guys at work.

Read the complete article here.