Irrigation Grows More
Than Gardens

by Clover V. Shelton

Opposite page: Mike Baron installs the system
while the horticulture class watches and listens. 

School gardens flourish with drip irrigation
Imagine growing up in a place where you never see plants growing, except maybe a weed emerging from a crack in the sidewalk. Imagine thinking carrots and potatoes come from the grocery store, cringing at the thought that they grow in dirt. Not hard to imagine in the heart of a big city.

But times are changing. There is a trend sweeping the nation to teach kids how to garden. In the process, they will also learn science, math, teamwork, values, healthy living and the benefits of hard work. With the help of Rain Bird, devoted teachers and enthusiastic citizens, gardens are becoming a place to learn and grow.

A Venice High School student walks through the existing garden to lay dripline for the garden's irrigation system while his classmate helps unroll.

A deserted paradise
Installed as early as 1927, the schoolyard garden at Venice High School in Venice, California, had been used to teach horticulture in a class focused on learning an occupation. But, the garden had become neglected, and when a new teacher was hired in 1995, she breathed new life into the garden — and her students.

Along with student volunteers and a local volunteer group called L.A. Works, teacher Diane Pollock renovated the school’s one-acre garden, consisting of six planting areas measuring 30 by 40 feet. The immense garden now produces a variety of crops including tomatoes, eggplant, squash, cucumbers, artichokes, red and green cabbage, broccoli, and baby lettuce. Oh, and weeds.

“The garden was previously irrigated with overhead sprinklers. While this is a quick way to irrigate, it creates monster weed problems,” Pollock said. “When I walked in five years ago, the weeds were waist-high. Overhead watering simply exacerbates the problem.”

A student and her classmates assist Mike Baron with the installation of the new irrigation system.

Weeds not only suck the valuable water from vegetable plants, they also suck the energy out of the students stuck with the task of removing the weeds. “Students get really demoralized by this constant weeding,” Pollock noticed. “It teaches them perseverance, but at that age it’s a real stretch on their patience and tolerance — teens have very little of either.”

According to Pollock, it was perfectly clear. Over-watering creates weeds and wastes water. The Venice High School garden needed a different option.
Rain Bird, one of the leading irrigation manufacturers in the world, is committed to the intelligent use of water. Additionally, their devotion to education runs deep, offering a free Rain Forest educational curriculum for kindergarten through eighth grades on their Web site (www.rainbird.com/rainforest/index.htm). Efforts are always in place to look for ways to continue the company’s commitment to education.

Mike Baron, marketing manager for Rain Bird’s Landscape Drip Division, began working with King Hempel of the Garden Magic Kids, a California-based non-profit organization dedicated to teaching gardening as a tool to make science more interesting, hands-on, and fun for kids. Garden Magic Kids registers every classroom with a garden in the National Registry of Youth Gardens, now with over 350 registrants. Rain Bird had the irrigation system and Garden Magic Kids had the garden in need.

“There were two old, leaky hoses and nothing that really provided the convenience of irrigation that the garden needed,” said Hempel after visiting the Venice High School gardens. “I couldn’t think of a better place to get started than Venice High School just because it has beds that are already laid out; it has active gardens already there and they were badly in need of irrigation equipment.”

Baron visited the high school and brought along drip irrigation equipment. With the help of Venice High School students, Baron installed a drip system. As part of the process, he also taught Hempel how to install the system for future projects and provided him with educational videos.

Xerigation = zero waste
Product donation is a large part of Rain Bird’s commitment to water conservation and school gardening programs. The company’s drip products were chosen as the best suited for the projects.

Leaky hoses, like the ones formerly used at Venice High School, waste water. The drip system helps create a healthy landscape while saving water. The water is delivered slowly, in smaller doses, at or near the plant’s root zone where it does the most good. With little or no water lost to misting, runoff, wind drift, or evaporation, water usage is often reduced by 50 to 70% over conventional broadcast spray methods.

The tubing is easy to install and just as simple to maintain. The products are designed to make adjustments easy. For instance, if the Venice gardeners decide to plant different vegetables and flowers in a new arrangement next year, they can simply re-route the tubing or rearrange the emission devices to provide the appropriate level of water to each plant.

The Venice High School system consists of almost 1,000 feet of inline emitter tubing on the three active planting areas. Other system components include an anti-siphon device, in-line filter, 30-psi pressure regulator, battery-powered timer and all the required fittings.
Though the system saves water and is easy to use, it also helps to control the weeds. “Drip irrigation will help to reduce the sheer area that needs to be continually weeded other than the vegetable garden,” Pollock said.

Benefits of kinder-gardening
School gardens not only provide outdoor classrooms where children learn about science and the environment, they are tools that encourage more nutritious eating habits, and therefore, better health.

Pollock finds that science is clearer to students who grow plants. “Creating their own compost gives them a real understanding of biological decomposers,” she said. “The students also learn about plant parts and the requirements for healthy growth.”

But Pollock is the first to admit that her gardening classes teach much more than science. “It teaches them practical math,” she explained, “such as ‘how many cubic feet of amendment do you need to cover a 15 by 65 foot area with two inches of amendment?’”

Since the students are learning a novel concept, their vocabulary and language comprehension improves. For their final grade, students must piece together their weekly “garden logs” and compose a garden manual. “For many students, English is their second language,” Pollock said, “and, they must make the manual comprehensible to a beginning gardener.”

Pollock noticed that her students learn to make nutritious food choices due to their ownership in the garden. “Almost all of my students who would not even look at a vegetable wind up eating them out of hand in the garden because they grew it,” she said. “It improves their eating habits enormously.”

Most students think that soil is “dirty.” Pollock’s students learn the difference between what is dirty and what is clean. “They become much more environmentally sensitive (even though they’ll never admit it to me),” she said.

Pollock is teaching her students about proper irrigation techniques. As suggested by Baron, the students will be doing an exercise using film canisters to measure the amount of water released from the different emitters in the Landscape Dripline system during one minute of watering. “They have to compare [the results] with their row mates and with each subsequent row to see whether they’re getting even coverage,” Pollock explained.

Finally, her students learn business insight. Since the students sell some of the produce from the garden, Pollock uses the opportunity to teach record keeping, marketing and business ethics.

Ms. Pollock is not the only one who believes in gardening as a tool to expand young minds. According to the National Gardening Association, children benefit from gardens by instilling an interest in living things, exploring life science concepts, building confidence and problem solving skills, encouraging teamwork, and enriching environmental awareness and responsibility.

The California Department of Education is currently trying to put a garden in every school in the state, claiming that kids who garden have a better understanding of where food comes from, learn self-sustaining skills, make better food choices and perform better in school.
King Hempel has noticed the improvement in students’ grades during his work with the Garden Magic Kids. Hempel tells the story of a young boy who had no interest in science and was doing poorly in his fifth grade class. “As soon as he got involved with gardens, he began to talk about the gardens at home,” Hempel reported. “His performance and grades have gone up 43% in just two months.”

The Venice High School garden with a complete Xerigation system was installed among the existing vegetables and flowers.

This student was transformed after discovering horticulture.

Continuing the trend
Rain Bird and Garden Magic Kids continue their efforts to plant schoolyard gardens. Since the installation at Venice High School, Hempel has installed a number of Rain Bird Drip systems in schools in the Los Angeles area, including a school for the severely handicapped.
Plans are in the works to install the system in some of the needy schools around the country, including Head Start programs in Kentucky. According to Hempel, Head Start is a federally-subsidized program intended to get children started in public school in a positive way. “They are very sophisticated schools but they’re in very, very small, often very poor communities,” Hempel explained.

To date, Rain Bird has donated $6,000, countless feet of Landscape Dripline and other products used in schoolyard gardens. “It’s going into any school that wants it,” Hempel said, “and most of them do.”