Earth Day Invite: Schools Offer Garden Tours on Earth Day Weekend

Editor's Note: This is the seventh in a series of articles contributed by Transition Wayland and the Wayland Green Team inviting residents to an Earth Day weekend with Open Houses all over town. Each week until then, you'll learn about another event at a different location. The seventh location in this series is at Wayland's schools. The following article was written by Katrien Vander Straeten.

Nature is loopy. She knows how to make things work, has done so for billions of years, needing nothing from outside and wasting nothing. She does this by closing the loops, which makes them them extra strong and long-lasting. It's good practice to preserve nature's loops and to imitate them in our man-made systems.

The Wayland Schools are working on it.

Wayland's schools are among the “greenest” in the state. All schools “deep recycle” every last scrap of paper and plastic in class rooms as well as lunch rooms. Even the youngest students, the kindergartners, will let nothing recyclable slip by. In fact, you will find them to be the most diligent of our young Earth stewards. You would be surprised at how little goes into the trash can anymore: plastic wrappers and baggies, and the polystyrene (“styrofoam”) trays that are slowly being phased out.

Less and less food goes into the trash as well. According to research compiled by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Americans throw away 40 percent of their food, and only a minute portion of that is “salvaged” by returning it to the soil which nurtured it in the first place. Not so at Claypit Hill School and Wayland Middle School, which compost all the lunch room and kitchen food scraps, except for meat and dairy. Happy Hollow will add composting of kitchen scraps this season.

The finished compost is used in the schools' vegetable gardens. The gardens at the middle school and Claypit are extensive and well-established. Happy Hollow's garden, which went in last year, is growing strong. Teachers and students are starting seedlings in their classrooms right around now. At one school the menu reads: “Lettuce, broccoli, chard, basil, peas, and sunflowers (for fun!), also tomatoes, carrots, and watermelon.” What isn't eaten by the students (often before it even reaches the building) is donated to homeless shelters in the vicinity.

This season, the Green Team is also working on adding rain water catchment: another important element in the ecological loop.

Wayland High School is catching up fast after the construction delay: a new group of students, teachers and staff is working with the Green Team to fine-tune recycling and to design a vegetable garden and compost system.

The Wayland Schools PTO Green Team, which spearheads these programs, invites everyone to “get loopy” with them. One of your gifts to the school community could be to weed and water a garden bed for a week during the summer, when the students are away. Keeping the gardens going during that time means that when students return in the fall, they can see the fruits of their hard work and don't have to start from scratch again. (Contact info@waylandgreenteam.org)

If you want to see these loops at work at the schools, Earth Day Weekend is your chance.

Claypit Hill School (40 Adams Lane) welcomes visitors on Saturday, April 27, from 2 p.m.-4 p.m. Bring green thumbs and spades to plant blueberry bushes with money raised at last year’s Talent Show. Sow husk cherry and other seeds in flats and help build a trellis for morning glories. Learn about their big composting bins and how you can do something like it at home, outside. Or learn how to build a worm bin for composting food scraps inside. Also learn how you can grow leaf crops this spring and help design and decorate crop markers. The 4th grade Girl Scout Troop 73171 will be there with some pet fun and activities.

On Sunday, April 28, from 3 p.m.-5 p.m., there will be another “Tour de Loop” at Happy Hollow School (63 Pequot Road). There you can help transplant seedlings and raspberry bushes, create a trellis for the raspberries and peas, learn how to compost at home, create more crop markers. You can sign up to "adopt" a garden bed, with another family or solo, to weed, water and harvest during summer, and admire the Happy Hollow BASE garden sculpture.

But first, Wayland High School will host the kick-off event of the Earth Day weekend. On Friday, April 26, at 7:30 p.m., the school will screen Chasing Ice in the Lecture Hall. This breathtaking documentary is the story of one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of climate change. James Balog conceived the boldest expedition of his life: The Extreme Ice Survey. With a band of young adventurers in tow, Balog began deploying revolutionary time-lapse cameras across the brutal Arctic to capture a multi-year record of the world’s changing glaciers. Don't miss this Wayland Earth Day showing, which will be one of the first grassroots screenings in the U.S. There is a suggested donation of $7.

Earth Day 2013 is organized by Transition Wayland and the Wayland Schools PTO Green Team (www.waylandgreenteam.org). You can find more information about Earth Day 2013, as well as a map and schedule of the Open Houses, by visiting www.transitionwayland.org. If you would like to host your own Open House, let us know at info@transitionwayland.org before April 1.