In our 3rd episode of Food for Thought, our director and creator of the Learn & Grow Educational Series discusses how to use gardening to teach kids about systems, how they work, and how they interact with each other to create larger systems. References: California State Academic Standards – https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/ Definition of “gestalt” – https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gestalt Bronfenbrenner’s Socio-Ecological Model of Human …
Author: Anne Zachry
Let Us Make You a Garden
If you are located in Ventura, Santa Barbara, or West Los Angeles County, California, and would like a custom-built self-watering container garden, but don’t have the time to put it together yourself, we are making ourselves available to collect the recycled pieces, pre-cut the parts, and deliver your container garden to you using proper social distancing measures and safety equipment. …
Food for Thought – Episode 2: Teaching Long-Term Planning to Kids with Gardening
Learn & Grow Educational Series’ creator, Anne M. Zachry, M.A. Ed. Psych., discusses the life lessons that are naturally embedded in learning to grow food and how this is deliberately accounted for in Learn & Grow’s curriculum. Find us online: https://learn-and-grow.org Follow Us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/learngrowedseries Follow Us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/LearnAndGrowEdSeries Donate: https://paypal.me/learnandgrow Transcript of Audio from Video: Note: The …
How to Pet a Chicken
Quiet Riot, our Silkie, enjoys getting scratched on her neck, under her wings, and along her back before scampering away to play.
Using Repurposed Materials to Combat Ground Squirrels
After ground squirrels dug up one end of the Learn & Grow test garden, Learn & Grow Educational Series creator, Anne Zachry, explains how she used pieces of an old chicken pen to create a barrier to prevent burrowers from tearing up the garden.
Food for Thought – Episode 1: Food Security During Times of Crisis
This is Episode 1 of our Vlog, Food for Thought. This episode is titled, “Food Security During Times of Crisis.” This video discusses the use of an old urban gardening technique, self-watering containers made from 5-gallon buckets, as a means of ensuring food security for individuals, families, and communities regardless of the economy and condition of the commercialized food supply. …
The Value of Patience

In our ever-increasingly rapid-paced world, we have become accustomed to real-time results to many of our efforts and inquiries, which amounts to instant gratification. Surrounded by these experiences, it is easy for developing young children who are still processing the world according to intuition rather than logic to misperceive this constant stream of instant gratification as the only kind of …
The Connections Between Our Two Areas of Expertise
For those of you who only know us for the Learn & Grow Educational SeriesSMÂ and its efforts to teach sustainable living concepts and methods, you might be interested to know that KPS4Parents, our non-profit organization, which owns the Learn & Grow Educational Series, has a whole different side to it. KPS4Parents also works with families of children with disabilities and …
From Our Garden: Okra
Okra, known as Lady Fingers in some parts of the world, forms an elongated fruit from each flower. The flowers only last for a day or two and the fruits are ready to pick just a few days after that. Okra is most commonly prepared in stir fries and sautées. This okra plant is growing in a self-watering container made …
New Self-Watering Container Garden Built in India
About a year ago, I encountered my friend, Avanish, on Facebook through mutual online friends in the organic gardening realm of the web. We both had a common interest in sustainable living and our online conversations started around Learn & Grow. At about that same time, the virtual assistant I’d had could no longer continue in the position and I …