This project is very unique and continues to evolve every year. Summer of 2024 marks the 3rd summer we’ve been involved with the garden at Seed School, which originally started when local philanthropist Andi Potamkin invited us to build a multifaceted educational garden. Andi and LRC have been developing a high school course called Gardening & Resilience, partnering on the design of a 16,500 sqft courtyard in the heart of the school. The courtyard acts as an outdoor classroom and features a kitchen garden located just outside of the actual classroom door. 6 oversized metal planers are arranged in a circle, acting as the heart of the garden at large. This is where students experiment with annual crops like cucumbers and eggplants as well as edible flowers and a wide range of kitchen herbs and medicinal plants. The class includes weekly cooking lessons by a local chef who incorporates ingredients from the garden. A large winding path connects one end of the courtyard to the other side of the school, taking visitors on a journey past a pineapple patch, a farm plot for cultivating in-ground crops like sweet potatoes and yucca, and two large food forests where you’ll find an unbelievable amount of biodiversity. One of our favorite features is a pollinator garden that is constantly in bloom and covered in flying butterflies, bees and other wildlife. The central location of the courtyard within the school means that much of the faculty and students pass through on a regular basis, creating a peaceful and simultaneously stimulating experience. Our goal with this project is to provide a rich learning environment for students, a place where they can be curious and inspired, with the parallel objective to beautify the school for everyone. LRC plays a crucial role in the ongoing development of the food forest, the maintenance of the kitchen garden and we teach a class session onsite one day per week.