Denver School Lunch garden
The Denver School Lunch garden is a 14′x17′x37′x36′ in-ground garden located just south of the playground near Wildcat Care.
Denver School Lunch is the hot lunch provider for WWA. A few years ago, DSL launched an organic garden program that helps interested schools start a school vegetable garden. In this program, the school provides land and water for the garden; DSL provides plants and labor for garden setup and maintenance, and they harvest the vegetables for use in their school lunches.
In May 2011, Michael Sudak, owner of DSL, broke ground on the WWA garden and fortified the soil with about a thousand pounds of compost — a huge job!
Later in May, Ms. Adams’ kindergarten class planted the first seeds.
Over the summer, DSL did a lot of hard work planting, weeding, and picking in the garden. Madeline Bechtold (WWA parent) also put in a sprinkler and automatic timer, some plant markers, and a few more seeds.
(Speaking of sprinklers and timers… The DSL garden is watered from the hose bibb in the playground. It’s very important never to fiddle with the knobs on the hose bibb or Y connector unless you know what you’re doing. It’s too easy to accidentally shut off the water supply to the sprinkler.)
The DSL garden currently has tomatoes, beans, peas, pumpkins, squashes, basil, strawberries, spinach, lettuce, beets, eggplant, and marigolds, as you can see in the pictures on the right side of this page. (And yes, there are also quite a few weeds. Let’s not talk about them, shall we?) For the most part, we haven’t had a lot of production yet. This is our first year, and the soil is quite hard and not yet very fertile. Michael and Janet have assured us that, over the next couple of years, the soil will be easier to work and the quality will improve greatly. On the weather front, we also had a cool rainy May and a rainy July this year, to the chagrin of every gardener in the Front Range. Hopefully we will have better gardening weather next year, too.
