SPEC School Gardens Program

The sun is out and so is our lovely school gardens blog! This summer we are featuring a "Garden of the Week" and this week we are featuring Thunderbird Elementary maintained by the staff and kids at Thunderbird Daycare. Our first harvest was on July 14th! We harvested garlic, potatoes, snap peas and kale. The kids ate some delicious potato salad and kale salad for lunch. What a better way to eat healthy than straight from the garden! Harvests: The kids and I making a promise card to water the garden.    The kids searching for "POH-TAH-TOES"!   Three times the charm! The trio of potatoes!   "It looks like a BIG chicken McNugget!"~Aaron   Guess what the kids also found??....a family of earthworms!   Emma gently picking some lacinato kale. Can I hear a KALE YEAH ? :)     Let's meet some of our lovely garden helpers and muncheros....   Our gardening queens ( Jessica and ...

In partnership with the Think & Eat Green At Schools Project and thanks to the Vancouver Foundation, SPEC worked with Student Teachers in UBC's Bachelor in Education program to enhance student experiences and introduce new teachers to the world of School Gardens.  Here is what one of the student teachers had to say on the experience "First of all, I would never think it would be possible to have a garden at school, let alone harvesting and sharing the produce with (the) children. Also, I learned how to manage a harvest with young children and how enjoyable and educational it can be for them." Students facilitated lessons on pollination and helped with harvests including potatoes. In another student teacher's words "I loved the potato harvest with the Ks especially, the whole event was magical from the students trying to guess how many potatoes they would find (8-50 were the guesses) to them exclaiming identically as each was uncovered." How ...

Students at L’École Bilingue harvested much of the spring crops they had planted on June 18th!    Grade 1s collected their giant sunflower plants to take home and care for in their own gardens.   Kindergarten students harvested their early potato crop and were surprised to find over 200 potatoes despite last yield of only 14. Grade 2 students pruned the garlic scapes off the tops of their plants in order to allow the bulbs to fully mature, while   Grade 3 students harvested peas, corn mache (a type of lettuce) and basil.   A second Kindergarten class also harvested the following day, with nasturtiums, curly lettuces and kale collected in preparation for the next day’s harvest party.   The students were brought out to the beds in small groups by UBC Student Teachers doing a Community Field Based Experience practicum, but the planting and care of the garden over the past few months had been done by students, parent volunteers a...

June 18 every class who had planted potatoes came out to harvest. Organized chaos! The tubs were dumped out, potatoes gathered, counted and weighed. The results put on a beautiful chart, created by our UBC Education Practicum Students. This year yields were low - approximately 25kg, of mainly small potatoes. There were a number of probably reasons - poor soil, growing conditions, watering issues, weather issues, and timing - a few more weeks and the crop would have been much better. Catriona Gordon from SPEC often says that one of the greatest challenges for the school garden program is the short growing season of September to June. Still the potatoes will taste great roasted up by parent volunteers for the harvest festival on Thursday June 20.

On June 5, Green School, and the UBC Practicum Students harvested most of the garlic. The crop was great, big juicy bulbs, which were headed for the kitchen to be made into delicious garlic bread by Claudio and his team, for the upcoming harvest fest.

The weather has been so cooperative that Queen Elizabeth was faced with a glut of greens.  After classes had harvested and eaten salads for afternoon snacks the boxes were still full, so they held a pop-up greens sale before and after school one day.  4 large plastic tubs of greens were harvested and at $2 and $4 a bag, sold out almost immediately, raising over $150 for the QE School Garden Fund.   Now plans are underway for a bigger and better greens sale next year....

Many collaborations have grown up because of Catriona's involvement with the school gardens.  Recently Queen Elizabeth donated two flats of strawberry plants to Thunderbird garden. Catriona and a flat of strawberries just needs a bit more sunshine...     Through her contact with Russ Evans, of Sir Charles Tupper Secondary School's woodworking program, planter boxes, storage units and 3 bin composters have been built and installed in many schools throughout the city, often with the Tupper students mentoring and leading elementary students through the construction process.    part of a composter, note the wire mesh for rodent proofing Hammers Mentoring moment pre work team meeting