Earth Matters

Edible Schoolyards

Have you ever walked in a garden with second graders clamoring to eat fresh leaves of winter kale? Have you ever listened to middle schoolers discuss and design a chicken coop that will be integrated into the surrounding garden and orchard? What about fifth graders happily popping the popcorn they grew and harvested? Yummm.

All of these scenes are common in an edible schoolyard. Alice Waters, already a well known chef for her innovative, fresh cuisine at Chez Panisse, coined the term and made it happen at a public school in Berkeley, California. She followed her basic rule: let good tasting food be your guide. In schools that meant young people growing their own organic food, preparing and eating it together, and thus learning how nature works and how they can work with it.

Most kids are raised on fast food and food grown on industrial farms, that is, the normal American diet. Yet the effects are alarming: obesity, early diabetes and asthma, hormonal imbalance, and early pubescence. School nutrition programs have not responded well to these problems. Many foods are fried in oil and more processed foods enter the cafeteria line.

Enter Edible Schoolyards. Land is transformed into an organic garden. Teachers and students spend time gardening and share the rewards around a common table. Their bodies become healthier, their minds more knowledgeable, and their hearts more connected to fellow gardeners and the critters and soil of the garden.

My goal is to nurture resilient kids by creating organic gardens, outdoor classrooms, and edible landscapes in homes for children and public and private schools. I want to give children first hand experience with the soil, seeds, water, plants, and bugs so that they will take better care of themselves and the earth.

My first large project was with Sarah Gibbs, former director of SEEDS in Durham, at Elon Homes for Children in Elon, North Carolina. For four years we worked with students who redesigned their residences and the grounds. We created a flourishing garden and Sarah integrated the garden food into the residential kitchens. Take a look at the pictures, below, to see some of the beautiful gardens they made.

I am presently devoting a lot of time at Greensboro Montessori School. We began with a simple fifth grade garden, but it soon grew to encompass the entire school. We know have two acres under cultivation. We follow Permaculture design so a large part of it is devoted to fruit trees and bushes and perennial crops. During the Fall and Spring semesters almost every student has a weekly gardening session. Each session has a little work and a little wonder. In time they all become very proficient at gardening and attentive to details like worms and toads.

We often graze in the garden; we roam around tasting what’s ready—spinach, kale, peaches, peppers, figs. We have 20 kinds of fruit and many herbs and vegetables so there is always something. They develop discerning taste buds. We pop our home grown corn and compare it to the best of the store bought varieties and it’s like the difference between real kernels and cardboard. Skeptical eaters become kale, green bean and French spinach enthusiasts. They name the plants according to their taste: arugula is the pepper plant, French sorrel the sour plant, sweet cherry tomatoes are candy.

We prepare food in the kitchen when we can. We grated a lot of carrots for 350 carrot muffins and diced a peck of tomatoes for veggie wraps. It’s fun to cook food, but we’ve noticed that they are happiest when the food is fresh and raw. There is something bold and satisfying about it.

Not only are young people involved but college students serve as garden interns as they help me maintain the gardens and teach the children. Their help is invaluable and more most of them, gardening at Montessori shapes their career goals. Several have worked with me for over two years and then move on to some other garden work such as SEEDS in Durham, NC or a Heiffer Project farm in Vermont. I’ve included in the library two published articles written by my college students.

Another school, Greensboro Day School, also has an Edible Schoolyard. This one is maintained by the seventh graders under Dr. Valerie Vickers, a science teach, naturalist, and peace activist. Her specialty is environmental education and she used the Permaculture garden as an outdoor classroom for her 70 students. Its design incorporates some wild features such as a pond and densely growing areas; these facilitate naturalist studies. Other areas are for annual crops and still others are densely stacked orchards. Dr. Vickers nurtures their ecological literacy by having them consider their Ecological Footprint and their Ecological Address.

The next step for Edible Schoolyards is to bring them into the public schools. I think that time will come. In the meantime Greensboro has two good models to follow.

For more information, contact Earth Matters. I can talk to interested schools about setting up an Edible Schoolyard and I can probably find college students that are interested in helping a public school grow a garden. For the mother of websites, visit www.edibleschoolyards.com.