Earth Day was extra special this year at Willard Elementary School, as students received the second part of a lesson in bulb-planting from local landscaping firm R&S Landscaping, while creating entries in the company’s “Earth Day, Every Day” poster contest.  

Last fall, R&S Landscaping held a hands-on bulb-planting presentation for 80 first-grade students at the school’s ABC Garden. On April 21, the day before Earth Day, representatives from R&S Landscaping returned to the school to teach the students how to take care of the beautiful daffodils that now populate the garden.  

Additionally, the students spent part of the day creating posters for R&S Landscaping’s “Earth Day…Every Day” poster contest, which called for students to design a poster focusing on either water conservation or plants and planting. The first-place winner of the poster contest will receive a free pizza party for their entire class, and will have their original artwork displayed at Whole Foods Market in Ridgewood for the month of May and posted on R&S Landscaping’s Web site and Facebook page.  

“Willard Elementary School has demonstrated a continued commitment to making Ridgewood a ‘greener’ place to live, and we are happy to help in any way possible,” said Robert Schucker, president of R&S Landscaping.

“We hope that our bulb planting demonstration has motivated these students into lifelong stewards of the environment, while also providing the school with an attractive garden of daffodils.”  

Willard Elementary is ahead of the curve when it comes to teaching environmentally friendly practices. At Willard, students are learning about the importance of the environment, and have taken action through an on-site compost garden, a school-wide recycling initiative, and an ongoing partnership with TerraCycle, a company that reuses juice containers and wrappers.  

Also last year, R&S Landscaping staff members demonstrated how easy it is to conserve water by installing a rain barrel in the school’s new garden. Willard currently uses the new rain barrel as a teaching tool to further its green awareness program.   The bulb-planting demonstration and rain barrel installation are both part of R&S Landscaping’s ongoing effort to educate members of the local community about sustainable living.  

For more than 25 years, R&S Landscaping has offered environmentally responsible, high-end service to residential, public and commercial properties in the areas of design/build, grounds maintenance, irrigation, lighting and plant health care.  

The company maintains a number of residential and commercial landscaping projects throughout New Jersey, including a 2008 and 2009 winner of Ridgewood’s Project Pride Garden Award.  For a free landscaping consultation, contact R&S Landscaping at 201-447-6205 or service@rscape.com.

– R&S Landscaping