The Garden is the Best Classroom

Kids' connection to the soil will sustain them in many ways for the rest of their lives.

by TRISH KELLY

When I was very small, and my parents still together, we had an enormous garden. Pea pods ran the edge closest to the house, and on the far side, rhubarb grew high enough to hide in. Time in the garden with my mother was peaceful and delicious. Before dinner, we snapped green beans off their vines and pulled glossy Swiss chard leaves from the black soil.

When my parents divorced, we lost the house and, with it, the garden space. My mother moved us into subsidized housing; a sandy front yard and a concrete patio were our only outdoor spaces.

For our relative lack, we lived well, thanks to my mother’s resourcefulness. Harvesting wild apples down the road and picking berries from undeveloped lands near our housing project, we filled our freezer with alpine strawberries, saskatoon berries and chokecherries. Our connection to the soil helped sustain us in many ways.

It seems many Vancouver groups are thinking of the healing possibility of gardens, as groups on many fronts turn their eye toward ensuring that children have a connection to the food they eat.

While Vancouver’s interest in teaching children about gardens is not new—City Farmer began working on a garden at Lord Roberts Elementary School in 1986, and even produced a teacher’s resource kit —it is exciting to see interest rising from so many areas.

One ambitious project that engages children in food production comes from the KidSafe Project’s Gardening for Growth program. The first garden, at Queen Alexandra School, is still going strong, thanks to committed community members including Master Gardener Sharon Hanna. The garden links classes at the school with volunteers from the Master Gardeners Association of B.C.

Having established a relationship with the Vancouver School Board, KidSafe now has gardens at several other East Side schools. Their most recent project, at Macdonald elementary on the corner of Hastings and Victoria, is a plan to improve the school’s green space, as well as to develop an organic food garden and outdoor classroom, with funding contributed by Nature’s Path and Capers Community Markets, among others.

Other community groups are getting organized, too. In September, Slow Food Vancouver put out a call to community members and hosted a meeting about starting a children’s garden. Slow Food Lions Gate and Les Dames d’Escoffier have expressed interest in a children’s garden as well.

Merri Schwartz, pastry chef at C Restaurant, spent this past spring piloting her Growing Chefs program at Champlain Heights Elementary in East Vancouver. The program matches volunteer chefs with classrooms of Grade 1, 2, or 3 students. Over the course of three and a half months, chefs visit the classroom, helping kids plant and then harvest an indoor vegetable garden.

“Growing Chefs grew out of a desire I had to engage with the wider community,” Schwartz explains. “…to pass on some of the wonderful ideas, products, and people I was fortunate enough to be exposed to as pastry chef at a high-end restaurant.”

At that level of cuisine, she explains, “You are working predominantly with individual specialty producers—people who are passionate about what they do, and the ethics behind it, whether it be salmon fishing, tomato growing, or herb cultivation.” Finding that these connections often ended in the kitchen, Schwartz says she saw a benefit to the community, if she could extend the links outside of the restaurant.

She decided to start with kids. “I wanted to start with an audience who would be open to the ideas we were discussing—namely the idea that you can grow your own food, even in the city,” she says. After a successful pilot phase, Schwartz is gathering resources and funding with an aim to publishing a resource guide, constructing a website, and spreading the Growing Chefs program to classrooms throughout the Lower Mainland.

Schwartz, like many who work on kids’ garden projects, is deeply committed. She will spend October in Europe, and when she returns to Vancouver, she plans to take Growing Chefs on full-time and skip the day job. She says the leap is a little scary.

“It’s not easy to leave a job that I love to step into the social and financial unknown. But I know that Growing Chefs will never succeed if I can’t give it a real chance, and the only way to do that is to take a risk.”

Trish Kelly lives and eats in Vancouver. She loves heirloom tomatoes, spaghetti squash, and people who call her Pumpkin.

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