Vision

Our vision is to help students, families, and our school community to work toward lessening food insecurity by providing opportunities for everyone to learn to grow food in our free-access community garden. A secondary goal is to strengthen our school community by helping people to discover they belong to a gardening community!

Wesmor Public High School is an urban school located in a food desert in Prince Albert. Our school community is gripped with social issues: poverty, housing insecurity, food insecurity, addictions, and gang violence. Our school, however, is filled with the greatest students one can imagine!

Our school borders an undeveloped green area. So we started to think about how our school could use the resources we have to help build community while combatting food insecurity. We dreamed of a food forest. We dreamed of a free-access community garden for students, families, staff, and whomever else may be interested.

Our school division, SRPSD #119, supported our project by giving us permission to use an area of our school yard for use for a permanent Food Forest. Further, our school division also granted access to land to be developed for permanent use for our community garden. Further support from our division included providing initial rototilling and the purchase and assistance in spreading wood chip mulch.

We have classrooms from neighbouring schools ‘adopting’ a garden plot. We have community members and students also adopting a plot. Our long-term goal is to obtain funding to purchase galvanized raised beds so that walking paths can be covered in wood chips. We want to avoid tilling – ever again. The wood chip mulch will help combat weeds and eliminate the need for frequent irrigation.

We created a website. We harvested and preserved pumpkin seeds from our fall pumpkin carving activity, and distributed them at our local Seedy Saturday event.

We also salvaged all of the windows from a local hotel during its demolation. These windows will be used for future green house or coldframe use.

We had garden seeds donated by our local Co-op, and our school division and the City of Prince ALbert will arrange for summer watering.

Hand tools, hoses, sprinklers, and hose carts are needed. As you have seen in the National news, Saskatchewan is in a state of emergency due to wildfires. Our drought is severe. Our heat and wind is damaging. So watering has now become the priority. We have seeds and plants in the ground. We have to support those who have taken a chance in our first year of the garden. If we do not water and the garden is a failure, then we will never have community buy-in again.

The fact that hoses, and sprinklers are now at the top of our ‘needs’ list is unexpected.

Action

We have planted phase one of our food forest! We have covered the entire area in mulch. Further we have developed a piece of unused lawn into thirty 12′ x 12′ garden plots. These plots are available for individual students, classrooms, families, staff, other classrooms, and community members. We have built a small greenhouse.

We built a website, marketed our garden at our local Seedy Saturday, and gave away free pumpkin seeds.

Our garden plots are being adopted and planted. It is exciting.

However, our goal is to add raised beds, irrigation, woodchip paths, provide all seed without charge, and to have a wait list.

We want to grow the potatoes, onions, and carrots that we send home in food hampers with our students who suffer from food insecurity and poverty.

Reflection & Celebration

We have come so far and we are so tired!! We have had two sites give to this project, prepared two sites, tilled as required, spread woodchip mulch as required, staked 30 garden plots and outlined them in twine, started tomato & other vegetable starts, and have seeds in the ground!! Our food forest [phase one] has been planted as well!

We have so much to celebrate!!

Now we work toward sustainability!

We are giving the Prince Albert Model Forest a tour of our project this week! People are interested to see what we have started!

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