The Schenectady City School District (SCSD) in Eastern New York, a Fiscal Year 2019 Farm to School Planning grantee, uses their school gardens to engage, educate, and connect their students to their regional history. These outdoor classrooms are the heart and soul of their farm to school program.

SCSD is in an urban district with nearly 10,000 students coming from a variety of backgrounds and cultures. 

SCSD currently has seven edible gardens in their district, with more in the planning stages. Their gardens range in size and function from 18 square feet of growing space at one school to 12 large cultivated raised beds in another. They also have specialty gardens such as an herb garden, a pollinator garden, a strawberry and raspberry patch, and an active sugar bush and apple orchard at their oldest garden at the Zoller Elementary School. They use these gardens as a place to teach their students where their food comes from and to have their students connect culturally with the foods that they grow.

Each school has a Three Sister Garden that grows corn, beans, and squash. These gardens get harvested by 4^th graders to reinforce the lessons they learn in their Native Peoples of New York units throughout the year. Each fall, the schools host their Fall Feasts featuring a stew of squash, beans, and corn, strawberry popping corn, and Mohawk cornbread sweetened by their hyper-local maple syrup. This Feast is an impactful way for students to connect to their regional history. 

There is a slightly different seasonality to a school garden in the Northeast. With short summers and longer periods of cooler weather, SCSD has adapted their gardens, agricultural curriculum, and in season foods to fit their climate.

While their gardens are sleeping over the winter months, students help tap campus maple trees to learn about the ancient and indigenous way of transforming sap into sweet syrup and sugar. In classrooms students prepare for the upcoming planting season by learning about compost with their classroom vermicompost bins. This encourages students to understand soil health, nutrients, decomposition, and food webs during the long winter months.

In late spring as many classrooms as possible around the district visit their gardens to harvest salad components to put together and eat in their classrooms.  The children love growing dill in their school gardens. In addition to its unique flavor, it is one of the host plants for the Eastern Swallowtail Butterfly. Students venture out into the gardens with hand lenses in late May/early June to find Swallowtail eggs and larvae to raise in their classrooms and then release back into the gardens.

With the summer season being short, SCSD encourages their summer program students to work in the gardens each week harvesting and tasting lettuces, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, summer squashes, and other warm weather treats while learning about food systems, soil health, water cycle, pollination, urban farming, and local agricultural history.

SCSD’s goal with their edible gardens is to not only expose students to fresh, nutritious produce they often don’t have regular access to, but to also stimulate them to explore their curiosity.  These activities and others not only engage students, giving them a deeper understanding of curriculum, but they also connect them more strongly to their schools and communities. They hope that with every seed they nurture to harvest, a similar seed of resilience and knowledge is being cultivated within the children.

“The simple act of planting a garden can have big impacts – from building a more diversified and resilient local food system to empowering communities to come together around healthy food access, climate change, and equity,” said Secretary Vilsack, who unveiled the upgraded People’s Garden flanking the National Mall. “We’re committed to our priorities, and we are leading by example.”

To watch these gardens grow, visit our People’s Garden Webpage or follow the hashtag #PeoplesGarden on USDA’s social media channels.

Denver Urban Gardens’ (DUG) Growing Gardeners Initiative, a Fiscal Year 2021 Farm to School Turnkey Grantee, creates a system of resources for bringing younger children into the garden. Studies show that exposure to gardens at a younger age increases the chance that children will continue to value healthy eating and gardening into adulthood. Hands-on DUG lessons investigating composting worms under magnifying glasses, engaging in cooking and trying new foods in garden clubs, and planting seeds and seedlings for the season provide students with memorable time in the dirt. 

Working with a cohort of twelve Denver Public Schools early childhood educators, DUG provided year-long training to increase teachers’ comfort level in taking students outside and integrating gardens into their curricula. The initiative’s first year has been a great success thanks to the commitment of these teachers. Additional lessons, webinars, and video content will be made available on DUG.org upon completion.  

Children need unstructured physical activity. As they work to turn the soil and care for their baby plants, gardens serve as both guardian and nurturer–an outdoor classroom with quiet, secret places that allow kids to discover that as they care for a plant, they are also protected. They learn the importance of self, that their efforts are important, and that working together and respecting diversity is part of the process of growth.

Moving forward, DUG will support a new cohort of teachers with year-long programming.  Local grant funds will further deepen our efforts by incorporating sensory garden plots at selected DUG school-based community gardens. As we rethink our garden spaces with restorative features, including wide, meandering pathways and features that encourage little ones to touch, smell, listen and eat, our hope is to promote a holistic model of earth-centered wellness.