Square-Foot Garden Program
Farming Alive and Well at Pinetta Elementary School

By Ed Albanesi
Editor, FloridAgriculture
Florida Farm Bureau

Pinetta Elementary School is a small rural school that is overflowing with happy and eager-to-learn students.

Monica Jackson can't wait until this melon reaches full size.

Located just south of the Georgia state line in Madison County, the school was established nearly 100 years ago and today has an enrollment of about 160 in grades pre-K through five.

Randall Buchanan is the principal of Pinetta Elementary and he’s not the kind of fellow that is content (or able) to sit in his office all day and play the role of administrator. He teaches reading to Kindergarten students and is the gym instructor for two other classes. Many kids first learn how to dribble a basketball in “Coach” Buchanan’s classes.

Buchanan is also a great believer in the Ag-in-the-Classroom program and has spent time and resources, some his own, on teaching his kids about agriculture.

When classes began at this school this past August, every one of Pinetta’s 160 students became a farmer. They were also given their own piece of land to farm.

And all of the farmland is located on school grounds. This was possible because of a special program that two of Pinetta’s teachers first heard about during a summer Ag-in-the-Classroom teachers’ workshop. It’s called the “Square-Foot Garden” program.

Kasey Odom uses the "paper cup" irrigation technique.

Each student is given approximately one-square foot of earth on which to grow a crop. What is grown is left up to each individual “farmer.” The teachers advise, but it is the students who tend to their crops.

“I built the boxes over the summer and filled them with a mixture of vermiculite, peat moss and compost,” said Buchanan. “If I had to do it over again, I think I would let the kids mix and prepare the soil.”

The boxes Buchanan referred to are constructed of two-by-fours and subdivided to resemble a tic-tac-toe grid. Each child gets a section. There are about 18 boxes spread out over the Pinetta school campus.

“We basically let the kids grow whatever they want,” noted Buchanan. “We asked them what they wanted to grow and then I went out and purchased the seed.”

A partial list of what’s growing on the 160 Pinetta School farms includes turnip greens, pumpkins, cucumbers, corn, squash, watermelon, cantaloupe, string beans, okra, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peanuts, sunflowers and marigolds.

During FloridAgriculture’s visit to the school, Buchanan took us to meet with the students in Gail Washington’s class. Washington, just like her principal, has more than one job at the school. She is also the caretaker for the school mascot, Chief Goldberg, a white crested cockatoo.

Devon Smith works with his tomatoes.

Each night Washington removes the Chief from his campus cage and takes him home with her. In the morning, they return together. Washington said her students are quite enthusiastic about the crops they are growing.

“When the seeds were first planted, the kids used to come to me and ask that I go look at their ‘farm,’” recalled Washington, grinning.

Buchanan noted that the children and teachers expand upon the “growing” experience by lessons taught in other classrooms. “The kids have related by creating graphs and pie charts in math class and by studying germination in science class,” said Buchanan.

The plots are almost completely cared for by the students although Buchanan said he will periodically spray some fungicide and a small amount of insecticide to protect the plants from disease and insect pests. Irrigation is carried out by the children using the time-honored “paper cup” method.

Buchanan is hoping that “Pinetta Farms” doesn’t get hit with an early freeze and that harvesting will be completed in November. He says that plans call for the establishment of another 160 farms next spring.

At this point it’s difficult to determine who’s more excited about the 2002 season: Principal Buchanan or his band of young farmers.

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Seeds for Success A Biannual Newsletter on Agriculture in the Classroom