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Campus Garden, Part III: J-Term

December 11, 2017
By Admissions Office

Original writeup provided by Terry Gregory, edited and published by Emily Bean. This is the third part in our series featuring the campus garden at Fremont Christian School.

January Term, or J-Term, is a specialized two-week session between the first and second semesters of high school. Students take a morning and an afternoon class on subjects that offer an opportunity to explore beyond the typical college-prep curriculum. 

From Mr. Gregory:

Part of the garden design concept involved my J-term class.

It is called "Bringing Back the Natives." A healthy garden needs a lot of natural pollinators (bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds), so we removed sections of existing ornamental plants and shrubs that surrounded the Y-Building to allow for planting native California plants that naturally attract the needed pollinators.

My J-Term students helped to design the new areas and installed the drip irrigation system in January 2015. In both January 2016 and 2017, we continued to plant natives at the Y-Building and at the end of the second-grade portable classrooms. I am happy to report that the pollinators have faithfully returned to our school garden site, as we saw many of them this fall.

My next J-Term class (2018) will continue this project, but we have also begun to focus on using the greenhouse for seed-starting and raising our own native plants and vegetables with the hope that we will one day become self-sufficient and supply our own mini nursery on campus, rather than purchase our plants from garden centers.

J-Term will begin once we're back from Christmas break! 

Big-School Opportunities in a Small-School Environment