Growing Together: A Garden for Young Mothers and Children through the Florence Crittenton High School Community Garden Project

Our mission at Earth Love Gardens is to facilitate a world living in joyful harmony authentically connected within ourselves, each other in community, and with the planet. With the Florence Crittenton High School Community Garden project, all that was achieved. Together with our partner SustainEd Farms and many others, we designed and created this wonderful community garden.

Florence Crittenton High School is a Denver Public School with the special mission of providing education and resources to young mothers, both with young children and/or who are pregnant and expecting. The school offers classes for the mothers and a daycare for their children, keeping the families together, along with providing them with invaluable resources to be successful in the world.

A project almost two years in the making, we were called upon by SustainEd Farms, a Denver-based nonprofit founded by Matt Suprunowicz and Izzy Petersen, that manages gardens on school campuses to teach students about nutrition and sustainability. SustainEd Farms provides hands-on, experiential learning for almost 40 school partners, focusing on schools with high student-of-color populations, Title I status, and located in food deserts. The Valverde neighborhood that Florence Crittenton High School is located in lacked community gardens and Earth Love Gardens was requested by SustainEd Farms to help design and co-facilitate the creation of this new community garden that would strike such a beneficial chord in this community and the lives of the students Florence Crittenton High School serves.

Aaron Michael, of Earth Love Gardens, working alongside SustainEd Farms, helped

envision and map out a master plan for the entire project which included a community food forest, community raised garden beds, pollinator gardens, a natural play area for children and more. Focusing on the about 2000 square foot portion of the project that Earth Love Gardens would be responsible for implementing, Aaron then in-detail, designed seven 12-foot-long raised garden beds (two that were narrower and shorter for the children to work with and five that were wider and taller for the mothers), the specific plants for the pollinator and edible gardens, and more.

The project earned a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (the EPA), which recognized the project's community and larger environmental value. Unfortunately, through "DOGE" government cuts in 2025, the EPA grant for the project was cancelled, and the project suddenly became unfunded. Mothers and children who were promised a garden had that suddenly and cruelly taken away from them because of politics, also taking away money from businesses that all were to support the project. Through other generous grants, SustainEd Farms was able to reacquire most of the funding for the larger project, however, the funding for the community garden bed portion of the project was still missing. Then, for 2026, through a generous large grant from the Colorado Garden Foundation, the community garden bed portion was again funded, and the implementation of the project was back on again!

Part of the land acknowledgment and honoring of the directions by Anthony and Metzli of the Kalpulli Yohualli Ehecatl. Click here to watch the video, courtesy of URME Inc.

After much planning of the logistics between Earth Love Gardens, SustainEd Farms, and organizations that would provide volunteers for the installation, the implementation of the project broke ground on Monday, March 30th. The project began with a beautiful start, being offered a land acknowledgment and honoring of the directions by Anthony and Metzli of the Kalpulli Yohualli Ehecatl dance and community circle group of the lineage of the Aztec peoples. The positive spirit that the project started with was felt by the numerous volunteers that showed up to support its installation throughout the week, all who selflessly put all their hard work in helping make it a reality. Volunteer groups for the project included the SustainEd Farms staff, the Valverde Neighborhood Association, United Fidelity Bank, Colorado Sprouts Stores, Life Line Colorado, the 5 Points Rotary Club, the City and County of Denver's Climate Action, Sustainability and Resiliency (CASR) Sustainability & Resilience Division, individual volunteers, and more.

The landscape was just invasive grasses and weeds before we transformed it.

Work included removing the invasive grasses and weeds from the site to provide a clean slate for the new gardens, laying down landscape fabric for the crusher fine paths, adding metal landscape edging, installing the crusher fines, adding mulch, building and installing the raised garden beds, adding soil and compost to the raised beds, adding drip irrigation, and finally adding plants. Through the abundant support from the community, the project was so ahead of schedule that we were able to plant perennial plants early, as well as focus new efforts on creating compost bins (utilizing palettes found onsite), adding extra wood chipper mulch (donated by Biegler and Sons Tree Company) around the existing Lilacs in front of the school, and utilizing wood logs found in this wood chipper mulch into a "Bee Hotel" and decorations throughout the gardens.

About a month later, we returned with volunteers for a second planting to plant the remainder of the perennials, also including planting the veggies to be grown in the raised garden beds. A mural was also added, led by artist Sofi Rami, who created a paint-by-numbers outline that the students also helped paint. The mural is titled "Creciendo Juntos," Spanish for "growing together."

On Friday, May 29th the Florence Crittenton High School community gardens were officially opened with a ribbon cutting. In attendance were mothers who attend the school and their children, people representing different great organizations, news agencies, and more. 9News even did a feature on the project. With everyone's support, it is amazing and inspiring how beautiful the community gardens turned out! It goes for show how much can be achieved when we work together.

We want to give special thanks for everyone who was involved in co-creating this project. Much of the installation of the project was also supported through Aaron Carpenter of Oreganics Lawn and Garden as well as A.J. Macedonia with URME Inc. We also want to recognize the organizations that had or continue to have a hand in the project. These include Gals Who Garden, the Valverde Neighborhood Association, the Sprouts Healthy Communities Foundation, The Park People, the University or Colorado Denver, Denver Climate Action, Sustainability & Resilency, Denver Public Schools Sustainability, Accelerate Neighborhood Climate Action, Kids Gardening, and of course, SustainEd Farms and the Colorado Garden Foundation.

If you are interested in Consultation, Design, Implementation, or Education related to your community (or home) garden project, just like this great project, we at Earth Love Gardens would love to discuss with you how we can support making your vision a reality.