Healdsburg school garden teaches sustainability

Aubrey Parnay takes the tiny start in both hands with instructions to find a place for it. She could choose anywhere in the wild garden behind West Side School, a charmingly haphazard place created by the hands of hundreds of young gardeners over many years. But she goes straight for a certain raised bed she knows will be the perfect place for it to thrive.

“This is an herb garden and the soil is really good. Lemon verbena will grow well here,” she says, carefully tucking the roots into the earth in a planter next to what she explains, with the certainty of an experienced gardener, is a Mexican sunflower.

“I love them,” she says fondly, “and these have been here for years.”

She knows from experience. The fifth grader, like every other student at the pretty country campus in Healdsburg’s Dry Creek Valley, has been taking “Garden” since kindergarten. It’s a required class for all grade levels and a highlight of the week, where kids get to experiment and play in nature while also learning practical skills such as how to create a garden pathway and how to build a birdhouse a bluebird will really occupy.

Under the guidance of Stefanie Freele, students have reclaimed every corner of the campus for nature, with native and habitat plants, shrubs and trees. While most school gardens are confined to their own corner or patch and are devoted primarily to things we eat, West Side’s gardens are primarily edible only for wildlife and are flowering with color, fragrant with scent and teeming with bees, butterflies and birds.

Students have done much of the work themselves, from choosing plants and deciding where they will go to laying paths and planting.

Freele secured a rebate from the Sonoma County Water Agency to remove a lawn at the entrance to the school and replace it with a native plant garden. Another $5, 000 grant from U.S. Fish and Wildlife provided plants and materials to create what amounts to a hedgerow garden along one side of the campus.

The garden is one of 14 in Sonoma and Marin counties that will be featured on this year’s Eco-Friendly Water Tour hosted by the Sonoma-Marin Saving Water Partnership, a consortium of 11 water providers in the two counties, including Sonoma Water.

It is the first time a school garden has been featured on the tour, which posts online on Saturday with a series of videos spotlighting each of the gardens as well as tips and takeaways for home gardeners. (Find it at savingwaterpartnership.org/eco-friendly-garden-tour).

The tour, which focuses on sustainable gardening practices with a special emphasis on low-water use landscapes, falls during what is being called the worst drought in recent memory in the region. A webinar on “Resilient Summer Dry Landscapes” is being offered from 10 a.m. to noon.

“Over half of our water use is in landscaping and irrigation,” said Chad Singleton, who oversees the tour for the partnership. “The garden tour is a good resource for people to visualize and understand different landscape design approaches and for removing your lawn and planting natives and adaptive plants that can save a lot of water and actually look a lot prettier.”

Each of the featured gardens are living examples of smart gardening practices, such as the personal Santa Rosa garden of Jesse Froehlich Savou, the owner of Blue Barrel Rainwater Catchment Systems, who will demonstrate how to install your own system. There also will be additional resources and personal recommendations from every garden and gardener.

What a school garden teaches

The West Side School gardens offer many lessons for home gardens. They showcase low-water-use plants anyone can grow, demonstrate how and where to place them and what they look like grown to maturity and show how easy and rewarding it is to incorporate children into any gardening project.

Not all learning comes in the classroom, said Kris Menlove, superintendent and principal of the rural school, which lies along Mill Creek and is neighbors and increasingly partners with the popular Middleton Farm.

“Our garden program is one of our great prides at West Side,” Menlove said. “One of the things that was a school district goal was to really make sure the enrichments we had were integrated into the curriculum. We wanted the kids to have an experience and connect it with what they were doing in the classroom. And we value our kids’ understanding they are part of something larger than themselves.”

Each “Garden” class is 30 minutes long, shorted from 45 minutes during the pandemic. Kids assemble by grade in small groups in the outdoor classroom for a brief rundown on what they will be doing for the next half hour.

On a typical day last week, they gathered around a picnic table to plant redwood trees from kits, then scampered about the awakening spring garden following their own interests.

Aubrey Parnay, a budding lepidopterist, inspected a fennel plant for caterpillars. She and other kids collect them and then safeguard the crysalids in the classroom, releasing them only when they have emerged as butterflies.

“We do take a lot of anise swallowtails, and this is where they lay their eggs,” she explained, poking through the feathery greens. “I found two on here earlier this season.

“I love that we’re outdoors. And I really love gardening. And there are a lot of butterflies and other birds in the garden which are passing through,” she added.

In a far corner of the garden, Carmine Curtis and Cameron Tovani shoved scoops of compost into a large sieve to shift out rocks.

“Everything that’s waste goes in here. We’re just making soil,” Curtis said. The 11-year-old looks forward to this time in nature’s classroom.

“It’s fun hanging out with friends. And you get to do stuff like this.”

The experimental garden includes a homemade chicken coop, refuge for their three hens. Kids learn to take the eggshells and crush them into calcium-rich fertilizer for the soil.

Gardens, gardens everywhere

Under the guidance of Freele, students have beautified their school in multiple locations, doing much of the work themselves and learning basic landscaping skills in the process.

They tend 26 mature roses in full May bloom along a front walkway, learning how to prune and fertilize and harvesting bouquets for moms and teachers.

In front of the office they created a rock garden to attract pollinators, replacing a water-wasting lawn. Now the garden is a spring vision of salvias, ceanothus and poppies.

Students also sheet-mulched a lawn to create a low-water-use picnic area, where they planted three redwood trees, several plums and two red Japanese maples. Behind the fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade classrooms is the native garden, which straddles a jogging and walking track. Kids transformed this neglected area overtaken by weeds into a path lined with examples of California native plants, from wild lilac and manzanita to elderberry, western redbud, milkweed for endangered monarch butterflies, purple sage and rush.

The school has its own rainwater catchment system where rain is saved and used to water the native garden when necessary.

“Students learn how native plants typically need less water than imported plants as natives are adapted to the long dry summers of Sonoma County,” Freele said.

She lets the kids choose the plants from four or five options she provides, accompanied by an information sheet about each plant.

“I tell them, ‘You guys study this and tell me what you think.’ I don’t want to be the expert. I want them to wonder and come to conclusions without me telling them,” said Freele, whose son attended the school four years ago and still feels pride of ownership, like so many other graduates who come back to visit.

Two resident black cats, one dubbed Chubby Plants, raised from kittens in the office, roam this little backroads Eden, getting fat on gophers and serving as emotional support pets to kids who might need the calming influence of a purring feline.

Bird feeders, bird baths, nesting boxes and owl boxes are scattered throughout the campus to accommodate the wilder animals that have found accommodation at West Side School.

There are numerous places for the kids to gather in small groups, perhaps to work on an assignment or just sit quietly and watch the birds, bees and butterflies they have invited to share their school.

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 707-521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com. OnTwitter @megmcconahey.