Fallbrook Garden Club supports SOF Program

FALLBROOK – The Fallbrook Garden Club is again supporting the Fallbrook Save Our Forest Environmental Education program. Their support comes two ways, with a donation to help with the expenses each year, and with volunteers to facilitate the program.

The Save Our Forest (SOF) group first introduced their two-year program at Live Oak School. The first year is a classroom and potting event at the fourth grade level. Classroom time is about 15-20 minutes, emphasizing three things: conservation, which is so vitally important to Southern Californians; environmental benefits, the wonder of trees and plants contribution to air quality; and community service, important for those living in an unincorporated community.

SOF tends the potted plants at their nursery to develop a root system good enough to maintain on their own. The second year, those same students, now fifth graders, are transported to a preserve or the Pico Promenade, to put the plant that they started the previous year into the earth. The first in-the-ground planting was at the biological preserve on Reche Rd.

Since that first year, all four local elementary schools have joined the program.

Fallbrook Garden Club also sponsors a well-regarded and national award-winning comprehensive garden program at La Paloma Elementary School. There are about 400 students involved from all schools in the SOF program every year.