Greening Our School: A Collaborative Project in Planting Flowers and Vegetables for Learning and Life

In our life, plants are very important because it gives us foods and it is also use as medicine or herbal plants and also gives us oxygen. Plants help clean the air, provide shelter and materials like wood that can be use for building houses and making of furniture. It is also use in making clothes and paper. It gives home to animals and help to prevent soil erosion. Knowing the importance of plants in our daily lives will encourage us to plant more trees and vegetables that will have a good benefit in the future. Gardens and green spaces reduce stress, improve mental well-being, and bring beauty to our surroundings.

Dayap Elementary School and the School Parent and Teachers Association launched a new project called “School in A Garden” or SIGA Project. This program encourages parents to plant different kinds of vegetables an flowering plant. At the school backyard, we chose a plot that we are going to arrange and make it our garden. 

On the first day of planting, we remove the grass and dig the soil afterward. We also make a temporary fencing rope for our plot or bed. The next day my co-parents brought different kinds of vegetables like okra, eggplant and string beans. As the day passes by we take care of our plants by spraying insecticides, watering plants and removing grass on our plot. We also put up a trellis for the string beans and small bamboo stakes for our plants. We believe that caring for plants should be given proper attention and importance, as their harvest can benefit many people. What we have long been waiting for is to finally see the fruits of our planting, there are now crops ready to be harvested from what we have grown.

Our second project is a garden of flowering plants. As with the first step, we cleared the area of weeds and stones. We also prepared designated spots for planting the flowers we chose — the 'alas-dyes' plant — because it is easy to grow and produces beautifully colored blooms. The criteria for this contest include using recyclable materials and planting native plants. On the second day of our planting activity, I brought kamantigue, a soil-grown type of orchid, butterfly plants, and alas-dyes, planted in recycled mineral water containers. We also build a wishing well made of tires. My husband helped us to build it, he made a roof made of plywood and bamboo for its column and to make it more presentable we paint it like a bricks using brown and white lines and color brown for its roof.

The criteria for this competition requires to use recyclables materials so we decided to use tires and plastic bottles. We put tires and plastic bottles in every side of the garden to make it as a fence. After putting all the tires we paint it with white color for its first coating and we used different kinds of color such as red, yellow, blue to make a garden look colorful. We will also put a wishing well made of a tire also. And we repaired the table and chairs in the garden.