Getting Down and Dirty

With a little sunshine finally come our way I have resumed my local, sustainable, and delicious food production and cultivation, aka my backyard garden. There is something viscerally satisfying about seeing the beautiful green shoots of plants sprouting forth from the soil from the seeds sown only a few weeks ago. Despite the cold and dreary weather, my arugula, peas, and pumpkins are already foretelling the warmer weather ahead and the amazing food they will become. I have always found vegetables grown by my own hands to be so much more delicious, and I think that involvement and interest in food from its literal roots would make vegetables more appealing to my students as well.

As plant life cycles are entrenched in kindergarten curriculum, I have always grown beans with my students on my classroom windowsills. As exciting as it is for students to see their plants grow, we were never able to produce food from these little plants,  a concrete connection between plants and food that is missing in such a small scale planting. This year, I wanted to make plants, food growing, and eating fresh vegetables as exciting and hands on as possible - the addition of a community garden onto the parkland adjacent to our school grounds has given me just that opportunity.

I feel extremely humbled and blessed by the kindness and interest the members of my community garden have in including students in their beautiful and fruitful space. You can imagine that 17 excited and often spatially unaware kindergarteners can be quite a challenge to share space with, but our fellow gardeners are always helpful and kind, often showing my students interesting plants, taking the time to explain what they are doing, and helping us accessing the tools we need. The sense of community in our garden is truly amazing.

My students, in turn, recognize how beautiful and harmonious this space is, and want nothing more than to participate and take care of all the living things they find. The glee they express when turning over the dirt with their hands and finding worms is palatable. The care they use when sowing our seeds and patting down the earth demonstrates how even a few visits to the garden have made them feel a part of the space and helped them to assume their role as gardener, care taker, and food grower.

We are growing radishes, lettuce, and cucumbers. The first two because they grow quite quickly and should be ready to harvest in June, and the third because it's our classes favourite vegetable. Everyday they ask to go to the garden and are learning the plant life cycle and new vocabulary words faster than any of my previous classes. Even my pickiest eaters are excited to try the foods that we are growing.

Even though I am far, far from an expert gardener, I am greatly enjoying passing along what knowledge I do have and teaching my students not only skills to grow food, but also to love and appreciate simple and unadulterated foods, starting with enjoying the vegetables they grew themselves.