NORTHRIDGE : Students Dress Campus Up, Get Gardening Tips

The secret to successfully growing daffodils is to plant the bulbs with the bottom part down: That’s one of the many horticultural tips students at Calahan Street Elementary in Northridge learned this week as they kicked off their schoolwide gardening project.

More than 300 daffodil bulbs--one for every student at Calahan--are being planted in front of the school, said PTA representative Cheryl Crooks, who recently helped land the parent-teacher organization a $1,000 grant to make the campus greener.

Though the daffodils were paid for by 50-cent donations from parents, they are the first phase of beautifying the elementary school.

Projects that will be funded by the grant include the planting of flowering shrubs and Los Angeles Unified School District-approved trees, Crooks said.

Calahan’s PTA was one of 23 nonprofit organizations throughout Los Angeles to receive grant money from the city’s Environmental Affairs Commission.

“The schools have no gardeners,” said Crooks, who was dismayed by how barren the school campus looked.

As she showed kindergartners and fifth-graders on Wednesday how to dig a hole deep enough for the bulbs and mark it with an ice cream stick, Crooks said, “The kids are learning how to plant and measure.”

“We need more greenery,” said Dione Kollee, 10. “If we plant, it’ll make our school a better place for kids to come to.”

A classmate, Chelsea Warfield, also 10, said, “This helps to make our school more decorated.”