School gardens certainly gain popularity this time of year, when the day lengthens and the air grows warm. While it’s a nice, “feel good” sort of activity, there are other advantages to having an agricultural bent to your curriculum, like chicken therapy. (No, really! “Bird therapy” has helped at least one student’s attention span.) Continue reading for four more interesting facts about garden and horticultural programs schools are using to engage students and community alike.
1. You can sell the produce of your garden.
Well, in California, anyway. Law AB 2367 allows schools to sell produce raised by students to fund improvements and maintenance to those gardens. Schools in Chicago, Kansas, Virginia, New York, and South Carolina can all sell their produce under various laws and regulations, so check your local statutes to see if this is a possibility for your school!
2. Your garden can fuel lunchtime.
If you don't feel like organizing a farmer’s market, why not serve the food your students grow? LifeLab collected a variety of protocols from across the United States to assist new garden-to-cafeteria programs, including handling and serving recommendations. (Quick tip from the blog: If you use a vendor for your lunch service, adjustments to the contract might be required!)
3. Gardens can be (relatively) inexpensive and easy to accommodate (spacewise).
Dreams of cultivating a school garden don’t have to wither and die from lack of space or funds. Just talk to startup-millionaire-philanthropist Kimbal Musk and his nonprofit The Kitchen Community to find out about special “learning gardens” available for educational use. School gardens don’t require maintenance-heavy raised wooden beds or permanent concrete beds to get growing. Musk’s recycled-plastic, modular garden beds allow for schools to create their own green space despite a lack of available soil-space.
And if you’re low on space in general, you could give Woolly Pocket gardens a shot. These special pockets can attach to fences in sunny locations to allow gardens full of produce to grow vertically, rather than taking up ground space. “Woolly School Gardens” come with complete set-ups with customized seed packets and sample curricula for various grade levels, and the site even features a fundraising page if you need some extra help coming up with the funds!
4. Use your garden to teach science!
If you’re looking for a neat way to combine your school garden with a more “traditional” class lesson, why not collect some fall leaves?
It sounds crazy, but those colorful leaves can introduce chromatography to a science class, according to a post by Michigan State University Extension. Students can separate the different pigments from the leaves by using a simplified version of the process scientists use to separate different solutes within a solution. If you’d like the full process to use in the classroom, go here.
Other teachers use the gardens to teach local ecosystems, plant structure and reproduction, decay, and even gravity! (That’s why plant roots always go down instead of up, apparently.)
If you want more lesson plans and teaching curricula, check out Syracuse Grow’s Youth Gardening Resource Directory for a fairly comprehensive list of online resources available for any school to use.
School gardens are not only a great idea, but also a great resource for your school to teach its mission in new, “green” ways! What ways have you incorporated your school’s garden into the curriculum? Share in the comment section below!
Additional ISM resources:
Private School News Vol. 9 No. 5 Connecting Your School Garden With Others
Private School News Vol. 9 No. 3 A New Publication About Greening Your Curriculum
ISM Monthly Update for Risk Managers Vol. 1 No. 5 Garden Safety Guidelines
Additional ISM resources for Gold Consortium members:
I&P Vol. 28 No. 3 Planning School Grounds for Outdoor Learning
I&P Vol. 31 No. 15 Roofscaping: The Benefits of ‘Green Roofing’
I&P Vol. 32 No. 7 When Urban Sprawl Threatens Your Country Day School
