Farmers frequently condition their fields before planting, and under cloudy skies Wednesday in the courtyard at Sunnyside Elementary School, hundreds of students did just the same.

Only where farmers might use things like nitrogen and potash, the schoolchildren used something decidedly more wiggly: earthworms.

“Worms are like little farmers,” Pam Mace, chairman of the Sunnyside Parent–Teacher Organization’s courtyard committee, said of the worm release.

Hundreds of students in kindergarten through fifth–grade released about a thousand worms into a tilled patch of soil in the school’s enclosed courtyard. The worms will help to loosen and fertilize the soil, improving the quality of plantings that will be made later as part of the outdoor classroom development that is being supported by the PTO.

Most of the worms were collected by students and brought to school. Others were purchased from a nearby bait shop to ensure everyone had a chance to participate in the release regardless of their worm–wrangling skills.

The worm release was the precursor to Phase II of the courtyard project, which is the landscaping.

Phase I involved installing an irrigation system and pouring a concrete sidewalk, with labor donated by Sunnyside parents Scott Zaiser of Zaiser’s Florist & Greenhouse and Tom Chicken of Graystone Construction. About $8,000 was invested by the PTO to cover the cost of materials.

Plantings for Phase II will include a butterfly garden, memorial garden, spring bulb garden, an alphabet garden that will feature a flower or plant representing every letter of the alphabet, and other ornamental plants and flowers. There may even be plantings of some vegetables, Mace said.

Plantings will be made to the outside of the winding sidewalk, up against the building.

Volunteers from Iowa State University Extension Service’s master gardener program will plant the alphabet garden and help with year–round maintenance. It will be up to the PTO to support the courtyard project each year to keep it from falling into the condition of outdoor classrooms at Oak Street Middle School and Burlington High School that were razed last year.

To help raise money for the project, the PTO is selling bricks that purchasers can have their names to put on and placed in the garden. Forms are available at the school and from Zaiser’s.

source : www.thehawkeye.com By CRAIG T. NEISES