Lavender Border
Flowers are heaven’s beauty spilling over into our world. A garden needs to be arrayed with flowers. A total of 40, one-gallon, English Lavender ( Lavandula angustifolia) plants are needed to encompass the border of garden A. Lavender not only smells and looks amazing, but it is also an excellent food source for bees! Flowers are a great entrepreneurial activity for students to harvest and sell bouquets along with fruits and veggies. Will you gift our students lavender?
Fencing
Fences may make for good neighbors, but around here, they also make for good gardens! The ECA Ag program needs 500 ft of eight-foot-high fencing to keep deer out of your students’ hard work. Like a foundation to a house, fencing is a basic essential that allows a garden to flourish. This fence will be protecting apple trees, blackberries, blueberries, and grape vines from our local four hooved, herbivores friends.
Produce Stand
The Ag program has been given ECA’s bus depot as its future produce stand. I am passionate about growing food with our youth. However, I am equally motivated to teach the basics of customer service and sales. The bus depot needs updates to become a popping produce stand. A gift of any amount is welcome to bring entrepreneurship into our students’ education!
Apple Trees
Did you know almost 1,500 farms in Oregon grow apples?! Apples are a mainstay in American agriculture and offer an incredible experience for young students to learn how to prune, harvest, and care for them. Twenty apple trees are needed; seven Liberty, seven Akame, three Chehalis, and three Gold Rush varieties. These varieties are chosen specifically for Pleasant Hill for table apples and cider. Trees will be planted by students in the early spring of 2024.
Greenhouse
Greenhouses not only offer incomparable early and rapid growth for fruits and veggies, but they also provide a learning space as well! As an agriculture teacher, let me tell you, it gets a little muddy and wet in the garden during an Oregon winter. The ECA Ag program is desiring a 100 ft x 30 ft greenhouse for our students. This size allows for a consistent teaching room (especially when it rains), and a large growing space.
Blueberries
Can you imagine the joy that students will have growing, caring for, and then picking their very own blueberries? The Willamette Valley is perfect for growing summer-ripened blueberries and Emerald Christian Academy has the land to do it! Garden B can support a blueberry orchard of 20 plants. Blueberries will be planted in the early spring of 2024 and will produce a mature crop by 2027.
Cider Press
Can you imagine students harvesting apples and then pressing them into delicious cider for their parents, church, and community at ECA? I certainly can. We will be planting apple varieties specifically for pressing into gorgeous, amber, apple cider that will go to support ECA Agriculture. Fresh, sweet apple cider is an excellent way to celebrate with Ag program volunteers/partners and generate income at the school’s future produce stand.