George Washington Carver wrote the following based on his experiences with school gardening at the Children’s House, an elementary school on the grounds of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial School (later renamed Tuskegee University):

Nature study as it comes from the child’s enthusiastic endeavor to make a success in the garden furnishes abundance of subject matter for use in the composition, spelling, reading, arithmetic, geography, and history classes. A real bug found eating on the child’s cabbage plant in his little garden will be taken up with a vengeance in his composition class. He would much prefer to spell the real, living radish in the garden than the lifeless radish in the book. He would much prefer to figure on the profit of the onions sold from his garden than those sold by some John Jones of Philadelphia.

You don’t need a green thumb, just dirty knees.

– Life Lab Teacher sharing her perspective on how to be successful in school gardens

There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments.

– Janet Kilburn Phillips

The best fertilizer is the gardener’s shadow.

What other instructional tool can you measure, record, graph, sing about, write about, and hypothesize in,

What other educational tool rots and reproduces at the same time,  is a place that you can break a sweat in, that is edible, and is solar powered.

What instructional tool can withstand the elements, is full of thousands of living creatures, follows the seasons, is not always predictable and can be connected to every culture in the world…

– John Fisher, Life Lab

The gardener does not create the garden, the garden creates the gardener.

– Alan Chadwick

Teamwork makes the dream work!

“Even though you’re not grown up yet, you’re going to be so beautiful and delicious and we love you!”

– Child in Life Lab’s Blooming Classroom Field Trip

“When he knows that life of the plants that have been sown depends upon his care in watering them … without which the little plant dries up … the child becomes vigilant, as one who is beginning to feel a mission in life.”

– Maria Montessori