What happens to the gardens in the winter?
The Learning Garden is designed to be a year-round outdoor classroom and play space. While the plants and vegetables sleep during the winter months, the space can continue to be used by kids and families. Hoop houses are recommended to cover the planters to prepare your soil for a healthy planting in the spring.
During the summer months it is up to your community to decide who will care for the Learning Garden. We suggest reaching out to the community to find a summer camp, nonprofit partner, or parent volunteers who are willing to tend to and harvest the summer vegetables. Organizing a volunteer harvest day as a back-to-school event is a great way to get the school together in a healthy, educational environment.
The more you use the Learning Garden, the better! Animals will not be attracted to a space that is a frequent path and space for humans. We also suggest planting a spectrum of plants and shrubs around your Learning Garden to deter animals from eating the planter vegetables.
We strongly recommend installing your Learning Garden within 100 feet of a water source. This allows for an easy irrigation installation. Irrigation is an extremely helpful tool to help keep your Learning Garden successful. If a water source is not available, the community must find a willing and committed staff member or volunteer to set-up a manual watering schedule that will work throughout the year.
A Learning Garden is an outdoor classroom that includes a set of raised bed planters, art poles, benches or boulders, and a shade sail system. Your Learning Garden will be unique to the space designated for your outdoor classroom.
We offer a 9, 12 and 15 bed package system. Each package offers equal parts of all three of our planters.
The Planting Day is a community event that takes three to four hours. See the Planting Day page on our website for more details on the Planting Day.
No, our beds are made using a LLDPE (Linear-Low Density Polyethylene). This means they have high-impact strength, flex modulus, and a great environmental stress crack resistance (ESCR) rating. Think about a bag of ice at a grocery store. This bag is made from a LLDPE at a fraction of the thickness and doesn’t “crack” when you drop the ice on the ground.
Yes, the planters have a 5-year warranty. The art poles and shade sail system have a 10-year warranty.
A response from the University of Illinois Extension Master Gardener: There’s a wide range of opinions about growing in 100% compost, which is not surprising considering that there’s a wide range of “compost” available! Whether this is a good idea depends heavily on the composition and qualities of the compost as well as characteristics of site where the garden will be installed. Unfortunately, there’s no standardized label for compost that details sources, texture, pH, micro-nutrients or other properties of a particular compost. To add to the confusion, some folks use the word “compost” in the British tradition, which is as a synonym for “growing medium” that may contain little “compost” as we use the term.
In theory, yes, you can grow in 100% compost, at least if it’s the kind of rich, dark, crumbly compost that you might make on your own from a good variety of sources. Much of the commercially available compost tends to be more homogenous, though — “mushroom compost”, “composted manure”, “composted bark” and so forth. While these products can serve as excellent soil conditioners or amendments, as stand-alone media they can drain and dry out too quickly or tend toward clumping with little structure to support roots. A common complaint is that in pots or raised beds, significant shrinkage occurs as compost further breaks down and/or washes away.
Presuming you’re installing 30 (raised bed) gardens in 30 different places, I think you may encounter a variety of underlying site conditions. (We Cook County Extension Master Gardeners do quite a bit of the same, so we can attest to that variety!) If that’s the case, and you intend to use the same media for all gardens, I think you might consider using a mix of compost and soil-based media that will likely do a better job of even moisture retention and yield a more forgiving, “lower maintenance” garden than most commercial compost-only media would provide. The University of Maryland extension has a short fact sheet on vegetable garden media that you may find useful in considering materials for a mix:
To the extent that these are educational gardens, it might be interesting to have the students conduct experiments in comparing their crops’ progress in different soil mixes if there will be multiple beds at a site or a bed can be segmented to hold different media. (Research suggests that compost-only media tend to yield somewhat smaller plants than soil-compost mixes, but pertains mostly to greenhouse grown ornamental plants, not vegetable yields.)
Chicago’s climate can be erratic — we come to our average daily highs and lows through swings in temperature more than steady conditions. Similarly, we can have long dry, or wet, spells, so it’s important that a bed be able to retain moisture in the former yet drain well in the latter. Many locations have a fairly heavy clay-based soil, so in the ground we’re more likely to be working in compost to promote a more aerated structure and drainage than to help sandy soils retain water. When building raised beds to avoid clay we need to ensure they can drain well, lest our raised bed become a soggy pot at its bottom. That having been said, a bed that fails to hold moisture can become a high-maintenance, water-guzzling nuisance when our summer days turn hot and gusty.
