School gardens grow food-smart citizens

Open soil, structured time and horticultural encouragement open new worlds for young students to explore—right in their schoolyard.

By Hannah Daugherty

Picking by the basket provides a sense of scale for food harvest, and provides comparison of size, shape, color and other features.

School gardens are a simple concept. Instead of just playground space and athletic fields, think flowers, vegetables and compost on the campus.

During the parts of the school year when weather cooperates, teachers carve out a portion of their day to bring students into the garden to plant seeds, tend crops and harvest when they can they prepare and eat, if things work well. Volunteer summer helpers and season extension through simple high tunnels or greenhouses can open up more months of school gardening in northern areas.

After experiencing fluctuations in popularity in the late ‘90s, these teaching gardens are becoming increasingly popular, especially as parents and educators become more interested in food safety, organic gardening and improving their families’ nutrition. Programs like the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley, California, aim to get children out of their classrooms and into the garden for fun, hands-on learning experiences. Part of their success is due to the fact that educators see the impact of the school garden reaching far beyond planting and growing crops. There are nutritional, social and environmental lessons to be gleaned, as well.

School gardens have an enormous potential to touch every area of a child’s learning as well as life outside of school. When they have meaningful interaction with plants, soil and food crops, children leave the garden with great lessons that will follow them home and stick with them throughout their lives.

Basic Lessons

The introductory concepts students have to learn in order to maintain a garden are basic biology and ecology. Kids come to understand the needs of their plants and why it is important for them to get enough sun, water and fertility. Knowing these simple facts of how plants connect to their environment teaches them the importance of keeping crops healthy. Gardening insights can spark curiosity for scientific explanations as they learn about life cycles, photosynthesis and other natural processes.

“Stiff, fuzzy stem.” Identifying plant species allows students to apply information to what they can see and feel.

The kids take away more than lessons in science, however. Math, writing and history can all come alive if brought into the garden. The students at the Northwest Initiative in Michigan integrate diverse lessons into their garden education. Young children count and divide seeds while some of the older ones take measurements to find the area of the garden’s beds. Writing about tasting their first tomato or digging up carrots helps children with their language and communication skills. It also further imprints the day’s lessons into their minds as they put words to what they have learned.

Teachers can incorporate lessons in history and social studies that show how people, food, place and farming are related. Children write historical narratives about gardens and learn how people (and their grandparents) grew their food in the past. They also learn about where on the globe certain foods came from and how people around the world eat. This is especially exciting in classes that are highly multi-cultural since students can connect their own heritages to the garden and kitchen through memory, taste and visual images.

Values and self-image

What can be learned in the school garden extends far beyond the “three Rs” and questions on standardized tests. This includes important values and principles that are useful in everyday life. The students quickly learn that maintaining a healthy, productive garden means teamwork. They find out that cooperation yields the best results.

Color, imagination and laughter help bring school gardens alive.

According to Ruth Ann Costanzo of the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP), the garden experience improves the social skills and self-esteem of the students as they work together and successfully produce something of their own. Gardening also helps them gain respect both for each other and for the environment. By learning about nature they can come to appreciate its many wonders and possibilities.

Katie Olender of the Northwest Initiative reports that the behavior of the children changes for the better when they are moved from the classroom to the garden. This was especially important for her students who exhibited poor behavior in the classroom, she sayd, elaborating that these students came to realize the importance of conducting themselves respectfully toward the space and plants. As they go through the process of nurturing plants from seed to maturity, the students learn to take pride in what they can achieve. They find it rewarding to eat the food they have produced through cooperative hard work, discipline and patience.

Healthy choices for life

Perhaps learning to make well-considered decisions about eating healthy foods is the most important lesson that children learn from the school gardens. Growing their own food—even one time—gives kids a chance to build a vital connection that most people lack. Learning to eat and prepare whole, fresh vegetables and fruits of the season opens up a new universe of preferences way beyond packaged, processed and advertised “food-type products.”

Experiencing food from plant to plate helps young eaters to appreciate all that really goes into a meal. They are more likely to try new foods that they have grown themselves because of their nurturing and expectation. This freedom to wait, wonder and finally taste lets children broaden their culinary horizons. (Perhaps if this author had grown a radish when she was 10, this author wouldn’t still be picking them out of salads today.) The benefits of instilling an interest in fresh vegetables and fruit are so great because of their potential to curb growing food-related childhood health problems such as obesity and Type II-diabetes.

Elementary and middle schools are not the only educational institutions awakening to the great potential of school gardens. Universities are also starting gardens for student participation, especially as more young adults who are school-garden alumnae arrive there. The effort that Alice Waters has made in this field at Yale University is an example. The university’s Sustainable Food Project allows students to participate in many aspects of agriculture.

With help from Stanford’s STEP graduates and all the other dedicated teachers who see the value of school gardens, more students will be able to enjoy their benefits in the near future. The tenets of organic growing and appreciating their food can in complex ways shape their lives as food buyers and impact how their generation treats the world. If people continue to encourage them and challenge them to apply what they’ve learned, school gardens will give children a healthier, happier and more sustainable future.

Hannah Daughterty, a student at Denison (Ohio) University, was a communications department intern this summer at Rodale Institute.