Vision

At Salem PS, we want to create a space that invites curiosity and excitement, where our school community can feel connected to nature and all the plants and creatures that call this place home. We were excited to be able to receive funding to purchase some new pollinator plants and trees to add to our schoolyard to help us reach our goal of creating an inviting, natural space.

Action

At Salem PS, we decided to create a pollinator garden in our yard, add a new compost bin for garden waste, and plant some new native trees. We chose a pollinator garden as our action project because the students had noticed that there was a lack of diversity in our plants in the yard, and the students were not seeing bees, butterflies, or hummingbirds very often. We partnered with a local organization called Food Forest Centre Wellington which is leading a pilot project to get more native plants into local communities. The representative from FFCW came into our school with donated seeds and helped our Green Team to plant them indoors. Once the seeds had grown enough, our representative came back to the school to help us re-pot the small plants. She also visited our school on numerous other occasions to give short presentations to all of our primary students about the importance of native plants and the pollinators that visit them. Our representative also helped us to choose the location of our pollinator garden and prepare the site. With the funding from LSF, we purchased flagging stakes, wooden stakes, and flagging string. We marked off the area where we want to create the garden and will be laying down cardboard and soil next week. Placing cardboard down first means that we do not need to dig up the ground. Once the area is prepared, we will be able to plant our small sprouts. We also purchased several larger native plants that we will plant in the garden to ensure the plants get established over the summer months. The Salem Green Team will be carrying out all of the garden bed prep, re-potting of remaining sprouts, and planting all of our native plants starting the first week of June. We will be creating some signage for the garden to inform the community about the project.

In addition to our pollinator garden, our Green Team wanted to plant some more trees to eventually create shade for carbon capture and to prevent soil erosion. We have purchased 2 sugar maple trees and 1 red maple tree. We are waiting on approval from the board to plant these trees. Once we have the go-ahead, members of our primary classes will help to plant the trees, add soil and mulch.

Reflection & Celebration

We have just begun preparing our pollinator garden and will hopefully be planting our native plants in the coming weeks. We are excited to create this space in the front of our school!

Our trees have been adopted by our primary classes, who will be planting them next week!

It has taken many weeks to even get this far, but we hope that the new native plants we have added to our yard will continue to grow and offer many opportunities for learning and enjoyment of nature.