2024-2025 Garden Overview

The mission of Hayground’s garden program is to highlight the importance of sustainable gardening and illustrate that growing food is accessible, even with limited space. We feel it is important for children to understand the impact they can have on our environment. Our goal is to offer experiences that will foster an environment of exploration and collaboration within the groups while nurturing each child’s strengths and interests.

Returning to campus this year, the garden greeted us with an abundance of fruits, vegetables and flowers. Thanks Aisa! All our groups participated in weekly seedings and harvests to provide veggies for our signature Hayground Salad. In the meantime, we continued our commitment to soil health, which included weeding the garden beds, feeding the soil and loosening the soil through cover cropping, mulching and composting. 

Along with caring for our chickens and gardens, we  have been conducting a pilot series of workshops that have included experimenting with vinegar and eggshells to produce an organic foliar spray that helps our plants grow, pickling, making teas and salves and bug repellents. 

Our growers gathered materials from the kitchen weekly to process compost. We went to the bay to collect seaweed to use as mulch for some of our beds,  in hopes of replenishing the soil with nitrogen that was lost from the last planting cycle. 

We, especially our Littles, always enjoy visiting the chickens and the worm farm. The visits offer the opportunity to discover and discuss the behaviors of our feathered and wiggly friends, and other organisms living in the soil. Our youngest growers had become increasingly adept in sowing carrot and spinach seeds, and have spearheaded those efforts this season. 

We reintroduced journals to our garden experience which have been welcomed by most students, while others slowly move towards translating observations and thoughts inspired from each visit to the space as well as on field trips. We use the journals to explore questions, make observations, and plan for future plantings. Some interesting plants we observed this year were cotton and peanuts as well as our lunchbox pepper plant that had survived two fall seasons in our greenhouse.

This year we collaborated with the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor. Lucy’s, Julie’s and Liz’s groups helped to catalog seeds that were provided by the library and collected from our gardens. 

Aisa and I had noticed an increased interest in  growing apples here at Hayground. Our senior learners along with Marybeth’s group were involved with the process of mapping out the development of the espalier apple orchard (dwarf trees grown on trellises). They measured the space and discussed different varieties we would plant. Some students in Liz’s group, with the help of Marybeth’s, Lucy’s and Julie’s groups, created a cold frame that would allow us to start seeds outside in colder conditions. We also created a micro meadow of native plants (under the reading statue) in hopes of encouraging more biodiversity at our school. 

As part of our continued efforts to lower our carbon footprint, we continue to explore creative ways to upcycle paper and plastic objects to minimize waste. Tools, structures and machines were constructed with  materials considered to be trash. You may have already seen icicle makers, self-watering planters and other creative objects.

—Mark Antonio Smith and Aisa Maher
Gardeners-in-Residence