Sharing Experience – School Garden Guidelines?
Posted: July 5, 2013
Categories: Conversations / Good Food Ideas for Kids
Submitted by Dan Hendry, Sustainable Initiatives Coordinator, Limestone District School Board Education Centre:
“I am looking for school garden guidelines or anything that might help me build specific guidelines for Limestone District School Board.
- Do you have any suggestions or models, e.g. those relating to agricultural grade soil testing, health and safety concerning children eating, or selling veggies, recommendations of size, style and location of gardens?.
- Do you have any ideas for how these kinds of guidelines could complement ppm 150 and/or integrate resources that tie gardens into the curriculum?”
Please share your ideas and experiences below or contact Dan directly.
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3 responses to “Sharing Experience – School Garden Guidelines?”
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Hi Dan,
Great questions. First, I’d want to test soils especially if there’s any history of industrial uses. The best is the University of Guelph labs. They will walk you through the testing and help you interpret the results. Metals & Nutrients are the tests I usually do. Most often, the nutrients can be addressed by addition of compost. But if there’s lead or cadmium in the soil, you’ll want to remediate (replace soil) and/or build raised beds.
Raised beds are good design anyways, because children can easily see the difference between the bed and the pathway. Don’t use treated lumber for raised beds, though – it can leach chemicals into the soil. (Some people are okay with the new type of lumber treatment that uses copper instead of arsenic). A raised bed that is a metre wide by a couple of metres long is big enough for a class to get around, to reach to the middle, and to take ownership.
Children should wash all veggies before eating, but I’d be less worried about them consuming a bit of dirt than consuming pesticides and herbicides from conventionally-grown produce. Still, it’s a good habit to get into. When children are grazing in a school garden, they will eat nutritious raw greens, herbs and fruits that they wouldn’t otherwise choose – and they don’t need salad dressing.
PPM150 claims to be comprehensive, but it lacks the “growing” part of the food cycle. It does mention composting waste, though, which is good, especially if that compost is used for the next season of food production. If you’re not growing a food garden, composting school food waste is very hard to maintain because there’s not enough payback for the work involved. Composting is indeed in the curriculum, and so is food producing, with many links in Science and in Grade 3. However, there are ties all throughout grade levels and subject areas. Please keep in touch with this group as we collectively flesh out the links from K-12 & build the communities of practice!
I don’t have any ideas about selling the veggies, but I am sure that our friends at FoodShare doing market gardening at the secondary level in Scarborough will have information about that. At the elementary level and in my experience, our produce is second to our process/learning, and any excess goes into the community through drop-ins in summer, and into lunch programs during the school year.
Sunday Harrison, founder and Program Director, Green Thumbs Growing Kids
You could look to Evergreen and EcoSchools for some general guidelines for school ground greening. Neighbour 2 Neighbour and Hamilton Public Health in our area have been pulling some things together, too.
While it doesn’t address school sites specifically, I prepared this piece on soil safety summarizing resources I’d seen http://hcgn.ca/urban-soils/
Comment from Clare Wagner, Community Garden Program Coordinator at Green Venture – clare.wagner@greenventure.ca
Sunday Harrison just passed along another great resource: “Food Safety for School + Community Gardens – A Handbook for Beginner + Veteran Garden Organizers: How to Reduce Food Safety Risks”.
The guide is available at: http://growingsafergardens.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/foodsafetywebcurriculum-10-24-12.pdf
This is a project of North Carolina State University and North Carolina Cooperative Extension. Thanks, Sunday!