Family, volunteers and Rio del Mar Elementary School staff came together through good old fashioned hard labor Friday to expand the school's garden before school starts Wednesday.

Around 20 Morgan Hill, Watsonville and Soquel Home Depot employees worked with about a dozen family and staff members to paint, plant, dig and lay soil and gravel to get the school's Lifer Lab garden, which had remained unused for 10 years, ready to go and grow.

GATE resource teacher and project volunteer Ted Alternburg came up with the idea after reading a request for compost buckets from fifth grade Rio del Mar teacher Martin Sweet. After discussing possibilities for expanding the garden, Alternburg presented a proposal to Home Depot, and what started off as a small project grew into a total transformation of the property.

"This is a dream that I was able to put down on paper and now here it is. It's quite literally a dream that has become reality," he said. "Students are involved in the process of getting food scraps from the cafeteria kitchen to put in the compost, and after watching the compost go through its process and mixing it with the soil in the garden, they grow and eat vegetables the next fall. And [they] know that the compost that helped feed those plants came from their own kitchen. It's really [about] seeing the cycle of nature and being involved with it."

Staff plans for the garden to be finished around September and will use it to give students planting and growing demonstrations, in order to teach students about nutrition.

"This is a great opportunity to be able to bring the learning outdoors and be able to expand our children's learning and make hands-on science more available to our students. And that's where the learning really happens," Rio del Mar Principal Deborah Dorney said.

The school's garden expansion, which has been underway since March, has been a community effort. Home Depot, along with the support of their employees donated a $3,000 dollar gift card to the school for supplies to finish their project, and Graniterock and Paradise Landscaping donated more than $2,000 in labor and materials.

"Lack of funding affects a lot of projects that our children used to benefit from [so] when I got Ted's message we acted on that and formed what we call "Team Depot," Home Depot project coordinator Lynn Gainey said.

Alternburg said that he hopes to replicate this garden project at other schools and has started planning discussions with Lakeview Middle School in Watsonville.