Vision

Our action plan revolves around an already existing community garden that is located on our school’s property and consists of four stages.

The first stage involves the revamping of the community garden. Over the past few years, it has not been looked after as properly as it used to be due to Covid, as well as a harsh winter this year. This stage is the base of this project and is something the students in my outdoor education class have noticed daily when we walk by the garden. Being a global and community orientated citizen is an ideology that I try to keep relevant to this course. When brainstorming ideas for a community outreach project, they were quick to mention the idea of giving the community garden some TLC and came up with three other stages to extend on that project.

The second stage involves planting a butterfly garden around and within the fenced off area that is the community garden/greenhouse area. The students suggested this idea to promote pollination of the crops and vegetation that have been planted in previous years in the garden. The monarch butterflies of our province are an important pollinator, so stimulating their growth in our community would benefit our garden and the surrounding ecosystem. Increasing the amount of pollinators in our ecosystem correlates with an increase of vegetation growth. The consequence of having a greater amount of autotrophs in our community may seem small, but is mighty with the positive benefits it would bring.

The third stage relates to the usage of the community garden by planting and harvesting crops that can be used the rest of the school year and in fall by the school’s nutrition/breakfast program (The Sunshine Cafe). Our class recognizes the importance of sourcing locally grown food for recipes to reduce the impact that mass agriculture of transport of foods has on our planet. By growing crops, such as tomatoes, lettuce, rhubarb, basil, and garlic, our the Sunshine Cafe will have a supply of locally sourced foods to centre their recipes around.

The final stage of the project ties closely to the sustainability aspect of this action plan. Students in my class recognize that they will not be here after this year or the next to care for the garden, so it will be the responsibility of others. To help make that transition possible and have other students interested in this goal in the future, they want to educate and inform others about what the garden is all about. They plan to make infographics and post them around the school and post around the fence of the garden. This way, students who are interested in the community garden project can easily become informed and get involved in the future through classes, such as the Outdoor Education or Environmental Science courses, or the Climate Action Committee within our school.

Action

Our action project eventually included a few different classes at our school. The idea for the project came from the Outdoor Education class that I am the instructor for, but also included the Framing class, nutrition class, and even the AP Computer Science class. The project started with a revamping of some of the main garden beds of our already existing, but run down community garden/greenhouse.
Once the garden beds were mostly repaired by the Framing class, the nutrition and outdoor education class got to work with pruning the garden and doing some seasonal chores that had been neglected over the previous two covid years.
The outdoor education class then got to work with planting seeds for the community garden to be harvested by the nutrition class, while also starting a new sister project. The sister project consisted of making our garden area more pollinator friendly with several plant species being invested in, such as flowering carrot and milkweed. Additionally, pollinator bee nests were added to the garden and rocked watering holes for butterflies to sunbath by.
Lastly, the outdoor education class made promotional posters to be hung around the greenhouse area and school. The AP computer science class is currently making electronic copies of these posters to be printed and also a school distributed shared schedule for the garden area to promote the use of the area in as many classes as possible.