Part 2: Designing, Planting and Caring for a Perennial Tea Garden in Schools, Virtual Tea Project Course, Spring Semester, annually: Synchronous weekly virtual class meetings support an immersive experience with a cohort of educators. An exploration in practicing the Mindfulness SEL Curriculum with students and reflecting on this in the safety and academic container of the cohort. We continue to explore herbal actions, and the sensory mindful tea drinking to deepen our understanding of the physiology of the body and the energetics of the herbs we are growing in our gardens. We start perennials indoors from seed, tend the plants, design the garden, and finally plant the garden in our designated school spots. Texts include: Starting Seeds by Barbara Ellis, and Homegrown Herbs by Tammi Hartung.

We practice the introduced weekly classroom curricula with our students in order to site the garden, build raised beds, gather supplies for establishing No Dig Garden Beds, plant seeds, understand the growth cycle from seed to decomposition, plant and tend our perennials with success in establishing a viable and thriving perennial tea garden to supply our classroom and future classrooms at our school with tea herbs. We access research to prove that mindfulness in schools enhances learning capacity, focus and attention, as well as contribute one originally developed lesson to the cohort’s original set of lessons to enhance the depth of the tea project curricula. The course is trifold: Seeding, Gardening, and Wildcrafting. We focus a large portion of our conversation during synchronous sessions on working the craft of establishing mindfulness practices in the classroom, mindfully being human as an educator, and what is working and why with the new Tea Project science curriculum introduced in this course. 

DPC for a Perennial Tea Garden in Schools is available to educators in any US state. One-on-one mentoring relationships with the teacher provide a consulting framework within which one’s custom school garden and curriculum are birthed. 3 graduate credits are available through Castleton University if desired.