“Look, whatever it is, salad or something else, it now says ‘from the ASH garden” - Patricia, Upper Elementary Enrichment Teacher  

 

At ASH, elementary school students teach the rest of us what the circular economy is. How? Our youngest learners grow and harvest vegetables and fruits that are served at the school cafeteria. Next, the food waste is composted to produce the soil for their vegetable garden.

 

Patricia: “How do the kids feel about that? Bananas! So excited. Over the moon.”

 

Getting our hands dirty and connecting with our food  

 

Patricia: “The students are learning about where their food comes from. They’re taking pride in growing food, sharing it with the cafeteria, and then that becoming food for our students and staff. They’re learning about hard work, and about consistency, grit and determination because it’s dirty and can be dusty, wet and muddy. But you know what, they love it. Everytime I go out there and say ‘garden club!’, I bring a little bell that I ring when I say that, and the kids just come running. Our kids are super consistent and very hardworking gardeners.”

 

“Last year I had a student who was afraid of worms and getting dirty in August but he wanted to be part of what we’re doing. So he was watching for about two or three weeks. And after about three weeks he was aerating the worms, he will do any job now that requires gardening and literally getting his hands dirty. That was I think my biggest surprise, how fast he was comfortable. And we think this is really important, because we have noticed that ECC kids have no idea where our food comes from. They don’t even know that carrots grow in the ground. We’ll pull up a carrot and they’ll be completely surprised that food comes from the ground.”  

 

 

Patricia: “We’re also trying to lower our carbon footprint, by keeping our food source within our community and the ECC has a beautiful apple tree. We harvest the apple’s and share them with staff and the cafeteria that turned the apples into apple crumble. So instead of the apples just falling to the ground we actually use them, which I think is really cool.    “We also have about 12000 worms in subpods, and when we dump our waste into the subpods the worms eat the food and green waste and produce castines, basically worm poop, which is this gorgeous soil. We use that soil and it’s all organic.”  

 

Patricia: “The biggest thing for the kids is seeing the progress for the vegetables. They will say ‘oh my gosh, look, they’re getting bigger. Cutting the sage, pulling up the beets, gathering the lettuce, they really love to see the fruit of their labor. Pun intended.”

 

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