Life Lab maintains the following list of good sites to find grants suitable for school gardens. There are many to sort through and additional resources related to grant writing and funding school gardens.
Grants to Consider for Santa Cruz County Schools
Most school garden grants are awarded in the range of $500-$3,000. Here are some favorite local and national grant resources to consider:
Whole Kids Foundation School Garden Grants – these may be applied to multiple times. This is a more detailed and complex grant application compared to others.
California Fertilizer Foundation – two grant cycles per year
CA Foundation for Ag in the Classroom – frequent cycles of awards, they have one grant offering that focuses on organic gardening overseen by Santa Cruz based CCOF!
Big Creek Lumber – Garden bed grants and donation requests. These are specific to schools in Big Creek Lumber Store communities, like Santa Cruz County!
Ocean Guardian Grants – up to $4,000 for projects that enhance coastal environments. Many grant recipients have partner with Groundswell Ecology on native planting projects.
Schools Plus Grant is run by the Public Schools Foundation of Santa Cruz County
There are more free garden lessons on-line than aphids on the underside of an old kale leaf. The trick is locating them. We’ve got you covered, and I am not talking about aphid poo.
The Life Lab Blog is a great resource to browse easy to do lessons and activities. Use the search function to browse Lessons & Activities.
Finding & Sequencing High Quality Lessons Life Lab runs the School Garden Support Organization Leadership Institute and from this work we have organized a great collection of Promising Practices related to garden lesson resources. You might get lost reviewing all that is there so here is the direct link to the list of online lessons.
GreenSchoolYards America has extensive resources related to teaching outdoors. Here you will find loads of suggested outdoor teaching resources these are part of a more comprehensive collection of teaching and learning resources.
Life Lab Store to see what we have available for purchase
What could be better than binging on Netflix while on a treadmill or spin-bike? Watching a webinar on garden-based learning of course!
Browse webinars Life Lab staff have presented over the years and check out the SGSO Network Webinar Series we help facilitate.
Find resources related caring for gardens at the Planting & Care section at www.lifelab.org/schoolgardens or search Garden Tips & Resources on our blog.
Our Mediterranean climate allows for year-round gardening and we are lucky to have the UCSC Farm & Garden sharing gardening tips. Browse their collection of For the Gardener Tip Sheets.
Cover Crops for the Home Garden and Orchard
The UCSC Farm & Garden has an ever expanding collection of video resources. See them on the CASFS Youtube Channel
We have songs, lessons and more. Click around at www.youtube.com/lifelabgarden
Many of our recent videos were created by our educators to be more kid focused. These could work especially well to preview an activity in your class before going out to the garden.
While this isn’t exactly a video we just want to give a shout out to Santa Cruz’s own Banana Slug String Band. Stream their Signing in the Garden or Pollinator Nation songs with your students in the garden.
