A public garden with a very slow apple tree.

The courtyard is 40 by 60 feet between the Hawthorne building and the alley. It has twelve raised beds, a rain gauge, a compost system, a bench, an indigo dye vat, and an apple tree that our science program planted in 2018 and that has produced a total of four apples, all of which were eaten by a staff member before anyone could study them.

What grows

Kale, collards, tomatoes, beans, herbs, and whatever a kid wants to try. The rule is that a kid who plants it tends it, and anything harvested goes to the kitchen or home with the kid. We do not grow flowers for the building; we grow food and dye plants, because a garden that is also a material source is a better teaching garden.

The rain gauge

A kid records rainfall every afternoon for the science program, and the data goes into the notebooks and the almanac. It is a genuinely boring dataset and a genuinely good lesson in consistency. The 2024 total was 37.2 inches, recorded by 14 different kids, with three days missing and a note about why.

The indigo vat

The Crafts program keeps a live indigo vat in a covered bucket by the wall. It smells exactly like a live indigo vat. Kids dye fabric in it in the spring, and the vat is fed and maintained year-round by the fiber studio, which means somebody is always slightly worried about it.

Public

The gate does not lock. The bench is for anyone. The beds are ours, but the bench and the shade are the neighborhood's, and on hot days there is usually somebody sitting there who is not connected to STENCH at all. That is the intended outcome.