Planting native flowers in egg cartons, sustainable efforts are celebrated by the younger generation; the Native Flowers project blooms. The workshop allows elementary schools to teach their students an interview way to learn composting as they build native plant gardens on campus.
Reiji Osu — Native Flowers Director — first brought the initial idea to the team.
With the support of Student Executive Officer Avani Goyal, the team solidified in planting cartons starting into a school garden. The Gardens and Food Recovery Program is dedicated to building garden beds for the workshops to use.
“I wanted an activity that reuses waste but also gives something back to nature, and that’s how I landed on planting native flowers in egg cartons,” Osu said. “I also saw that sustainability isn’t really taught hands-on in school, and the kids loved building something themselves.”
Alongside Osu, the department's coordinator David Kiss, is working on setting up workshops at local schools. Their first one is set to debut November 12 at Carmel Del Mar Elementary school with three third grade classes.
“Right now the main goal is to run the first workshop at Carmel Del Mar well and learn what works and what doesn’t,” Osu said. “Long term, I want to turn it into a kit teachers can run on their own, so it doesn’t depend on me being at every school. I want the kids to understand that native plants support pollinators like bees, butterflies and hummingbirds, and that they can actually help with that themselves.”
At the workshop, students will build within two wooden garden beds with plants and seeds from Anderson’s La Costa Nursery. Each student will bring a cardboard egg carton from home — a typical item to be discarded — and fill it with soil and seeds from California poppies, goldfields, tidy tips and baby blue eyes. The cartons will be planted into the garden beds.
“After that they plant their cartons right into the beds, and the cartons break down in the soil,” Osu said. “We’re also planting bigger native perennials at the ends of each bed, like Cleveland sage and California aster, so the garden stays alive over summer. Then in late spring, while the flowers are blooming, the kids take them home and replant them.”