Kente School garden

Students donate potato harvest to Food to Share

In February and March of this year, Cassie Lyon’s Grade Four and Five students at Kente School started writing “persuasive” letters to local businesses, seeking supplies to create a series of gardening boxes. Their appeals were successful. Home Hardware donated wood for the boxes, Highline Mushrooms provided compost, and The County Bounty agreed to provide vegetable seedlings. By April, the Grade Seven and Eight class, under the direction of teacher Ian Blair, combined mathematics and woodworking to construct the boxes. Miss Lyon’s students performed the volume and surface area calculations to figure out how much plastic sheeting and compost would be needed. They also put in a lot of sweat equity, using shovels and wheelbarrows to transfer a dump truck load of soil and compost into the boxes. The first planting occurred in May, and by the end of June the students were harvesting their first crop of greens. Local families volunteered to take care of the garden over the summer break.

Teacher Cassie Lyon and Glen Wallis from Food to Share stand behind the Grade Four and Five students at Kente School as they display harvest from the school garden.

The project is part of a move to classify Kente as an eco-school. “We were certified as a Goldlevel eco-school last year, and the garden was our final big school-wide initiative that we were working on,” says Lyon. “We received a lot of support from the community, and everyone was very enthusiastic about it.” Right from the beginning the intent was to share any of the produce grown by the students. “Because we can really see how community gardening fits into the whole concern about food security in Prince Edward County. We liked the idea of supporting our community, and also it seemed a deep learning opportunity for the children in terms of giving back to the larger community,” says Lyon. This concept of giving back resonates in an area where a number of families have to turn to the food bank for help. The project also serves to educate the students about the importance of healthful, nutritious food. “Last spring I had students say to me ‘Oh, Miss Lyon, I never actually liked salad,’ and now they are trying things they’ve never had before, like radishes, different lettuces and beans.”

When the students returned to school in September, they began to harvest vegetables such as tomatoes, squash and onions. They have a large supply of frozen tomatoes that they will use to make tomato sauce. A couple of weeks ago they harvested their potatoes, ending up with well over 10 kilograms that they are donating to Food to Share. On Friday, Glen Wallis visited the school to collect the Kente bounty. He praised the students for their efforts, as well as for their generosity. “I think it’s great they have students thinking about issues like ecology and the food system. It’s especially laudable that the students decided to give some produce to a charity,” he says. “My hope is that they understand that people have a right to good food.” Wallis plans to use the potatoes to make stew. “This donation is special, and we will make sure that whoever receives the dishes we make with them knows where they came from.” Wallis would like to see more schools involved in community gardening. “It’s very important to understand how food is part of our lives. Even the simple knowledge of what plants look like—that potatoes are tubers in the ground and that beans grow on poles and bushes.”

For the students, this was a learning experience on many levels. They applied their knowledge of math to design and construct the boxes. They learned firsthand what is required to grow vegetables and they were able to practise some culinary skills in a junior Iron Chef competition using fresh-picked vegetables. Nine-year-old Emersyn Bartlett is one of the students in Miss Lyon’s class, and she has a flower garden at home, but had never grown vegetables. “It takes a lot of work and you really need to focus so all the vegetables don’t die. We needed to put a whole bunch of soil in it, and the soil is really heavy,” says Emersyn. “I really liked doing the gardening because it’s fun. I liked the tomatoes that we grew here, and the broccoli.” She was happy to donate some of the potatoes to Food to Share. “It makes me feel really nice, because people are trying to help other people.”