Vision

Our students began this project with the intention of designing and creating an Indigenous pollinator garden using one of our existing garden beds with the following intentions:
– They want to create a healing space for reconciliation
– They want to add a space to help support pollinators to help our garden and safeguard these species
– As a school with a high indigenous population and food insecurities; our students wanted to use our existing space to help combat these issues.

Action

Junior Students partnered with the Ottawa Seed Library and Jennifer Lord (Metis Elder) to plan out planting three varieties of Native Pollinators which will bloom year young to provide food; including Milkweed due to it being a Monarch’s only food source.

Our eco-club has a few members from the junior class who took part in the planning for this project and ran the idea that we could also use this opportunity to get the whole-school involved by using a buddy-block to help prepare the beds which are not designated for the pollinator plants and decide what we would plant. As a community they planned a day outside where we cleaned up the gardens, looked to where pollinators could make their homes, spoke about the purpose of the empty beds, and shared the plan for our outdoor garden taking volunteers to raise seedlings before transplanting and planting the seed of hardier vegetables. This day was entirely planned by the students of the eco-club and brought to staff through their staff representative. Our primary students grew seeds from seedlings then brought them to other classroom to raise and eventually plant in the garden.

As this project developed we got approval from LSF to allocate money which was originally delegated to plants and plantars for supports such as cages and tarps for plants instead.

At this point our project is still going to occur into the June months and over the Summer with our Parish community and Daycare Community helping to care for and harvest the garden as it grows. Upon submitting the project our pollinator plants were being being delivered to be planted and plants which could not be planted by seeds transplanted into our Garden by students.