Sunlight and Rainwater farm...Lessons in the garden.

We have been doing a lot of estimating and guessing but since the goal of a lot of what we do is to
teach, we wanted to start looking at how our work applies to STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) education goals.  We are going to throw some other things in there as well like community engagement, but let's start with the basics and see how this fits in.

We focus a lot on problem solving in our gardens; dealing with things based on cost, time, and need.  For our project we settled on using produce crates to grow in.  We will talk more about why we chose produce crates later, but for right now, we are going to talk about the crate as a standard unit of measure for our project.

Since we are growing in produce crates, we have to have stuff

to grow in, right?  We have to have something for the plants to place their roots in.  This "stuff" is called a growing medium.  We are going to use a mixture of stuff in our growing medium.  We are going to use wood chips and compost for this project.  Not only that, but we are going to track how this growing medium changes over time.  This is another reason that produce crates are great for this project.  They provide us with and excellent container for our growing medium and we can keep track of just about every cubic inch as this project goes forward!

So let's start from the beginning.  We need to figure out how much growing medium we are going to have in each crate.  To find out how much growing medium we are going to need in each crate, we are going to have to calculate the volume of each crate.  This will give us the amount we need in each crate AND serve as a basic measurement for this project.

To calculate volume we are going to have to have three things: the length of the crate, the width of the crate and the height of the crate.  To calculate the volume of the crate we multiply the length times the width times the height (LxWxH)
The length of each crate is 20 inches.
The width of each crate is 12 inches.
The height of each crate is 12 inches.

20 in. x 12 in. = 240 sq. in.
240 sq in. x 12 in = 2880 cu. inches

Why is this important?
This is important because of all of the other things that we are going to do going forward.  We now know that each crate has approximately 2880 cu. inches of growing medium in it.  We also know that we are going to have over 200 crates in the Atlanta area, in Haiti, and in Puerto Rico, so knowing this basic unit of measure is going to put us well on our way to figuring a lot of things out!

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