Have you been to Garden Ventura recently? If not you are missing out in a lot of new and beautiful things. Garden Ventura was possible now that the class of 2019 was working on it. The flowers are blooming and the garden is looking F-A-B-U-L-O-U-S. Garden Ventura is filled with alot of plants like tomatoes, squash, roses and many more. Garden Ventura has improved a lot since last year. Yes, our garden may be small, but it is well kept and beautiful. We have gotten a notice from the Central Texas Gardener show on Klru,  and they want to capture the beauty of our garden.

         Last year in science, the class of 2019 helped the 10th and 11th graders design the garden for their project. The high schoolers designed the trailer and we designed the garden. We were put into different groups and as a team we designed our own garden. At the end, we chose the best design and actually got to plant the flowers and vegetables outside the trailer. The vegetables and fruits were chosen to be the best for Texas weather.

In 7th grade we used the design process to design a garden that was appropriate to the the Texas weather. Our clients were the engineering students, they had designed a trailer and remodeled it, to be a teacher hang out place. First we had to look at plants that could stand the Texas sun. Then, we had to look and see at the space that we had. Based on the space we found plants that would only take up 1 foot by 1 foot. Then, we made a design to where we wanted the plants to be, depending on where the sun would hit. We made a 3d model of the garden that our group designed on the program “google sketchup”. We uploaded this up to our blog that we had. Once everyone had finished, we decided to show our ideas to the engineering students. They chose the idea that they liked best. Then we decided to make the idea into reality, and buy everything for the garden, of course under a budget. Once we bought all the plants we decided to get down and dirty. We watered the weeds and put cardboard over it, so that the weeds would die. We put mulch over the cardboard, and then planted our plants. The garden added an extra pop to the trailer.

So the design process has been the same since 7th grade when we used it to plan our garden it’s just that back then we did not know it was called a “Design Process”, we didn’t even know that we started working with the design process and exploring the 5 steps which are first:define your problem and second:tool up,third:make it, forth:improve your design and last but not least share it. Back in 7th grade we went through that same process but never really knew it had a name until we started working on modules (videos with steps and challenges we have to follow in a certain amount of time) and we realized we have been following the design process since 7th grade. Our 7th grade experience with the design process has helped us with being able to become more comfortable and oriented in the P.L.T.W (Project Lead The Way) Field.