Building a Sustainable Food System: Tools for School Gardens

School has started, and plans for sustainable school gardens are already starting to blossom. This is the season of harvest, when everyone is thinking about food: pumpkins, corn, apples and Thanksgiving await. Even though gardens are going to sleep for the winter, there are tools that can help school councils and interested teachers and parents to begin planning for the gardens that will emerge in the spring.

The school year is a poor fit for the garden, and many schools struggle with the desire to create a glorious garden in the spring and the reality that it may be less than well-tended during the summer months. It can be hard to find crops that grow quickly enough in the spring to see a harvest before the school year is out. The regular turnover of children from year to year and teacher to teacher means that kids may not see the results of their work. The book School Year Gardens by Paris Marshall Smith and Arzeena Hamir addresses ways to integrate the school year months into school garden planning.

The National Gardening Association has written a book called Grow Lab: The Complete Guide to Growing in the Classroom. This book outlines sustainable food that a class can grow indoors, from herbs to potatoes. In British Columbia, an Agricultural Association program called Spuds in Tubs brings just that into the classroom: sustainable, local food grown in a tub. Children plant potatoes indoors near a source of natural light, and the rapid-growing variety of potatoes produces spuds in record time, allowing the children to harvest a crop before school ends. Growing indoors allows children to experience the full life cycle of a plant, because seeds can be started much earlier.

Why garden at school? Raising sustainable food inside or outside the classroom gets children connected to the life cycle of a plant. For many children, food simply comes from the grocery store shelves, and it comes pre-packaged and laced with so many artificial ingredients that it is hard to recognize that it came from a plant at all. School gardens can change that perception, providing children with access to real, growing food. Gardens also get children outdoors, and in this age of reduced outdoor activity, enjoying learning outside is a good thing to grow.

School gardens can transform the relationship that children have with nature, simply by planting and tending a few seeds. While building one might seem logistically challenging, the growth of our kids is worth it.