Category — Children

Katie Stagliano distributes her garden bounty to folks in need in Summerville, S.C. Photo by Adele Starr.

Girl Finds Goodness in Gardening

By Sandy Summers
American Profile
August 2, 2011

Excerpt:

Katie Stagliano, 13, gives new meaning to the word sharecropper.

The founder of Katie’s Krops oversees six gardens that have produced tons of vegetables for soup kitchens and other charitable organizations in and around her hometown of Summerville, S.C. (pop. 43,392).

Katie’s Krops took root in 2008 when Katie brought home a cabbage seedling for a third-grade science project at Pinewood Preparatory School.

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“I Love Gardening”

Designed by the popular cartoonist Mike Jupp

“It all seems to be happening down in the allotments.” 1000 pieces.

See the puzzle here.

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“Everything is focused on what’s happening at the farm.”

By Bonnie Rochman
Time Magazine
May 30, 2011

Excerpt:

Outside Seattle, Shoofly Farm is already sold out, with 600 kids signed up for 10 sessions chock-full of “care and fun with farm animals” and “preparation of their own snacks and outdoor cooking” (think hand-cranked ice cream and eggs sizzled in cast-iron pans over the fire) — in other words, what earlier generations considered work.

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Owens’ Urban Agriculture and Sustainability Certificate Program will require 26 credit hours of coursework

June 13, 2011

PERRYSBURG TOWNSHIP, OH – Area residents with aspirations of learning how to grow, maintain, harvest, store and distribute local produce and animal products will now have the opportunity to begin their educational journey at Owens Community College as the academic institution’s Department of Science unveils a new Urban Agriculture and Sustainability Certificate Program. Beginning Fall Semester 2011, the new academic program will be offered on the Toledo-area Campus in Perrysburg Township and at The Source Learning Center in downtown Toledo.

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The connection between compost and food, and the education of children

Young people come to volunteer at Vancouver’s Compost Demonstration Garden as soon as summer holidays begin. Claire and Blair visited this week and helped us harvest our weekly donation basket of produce. They then delivered it to West Side Family Place.

Head Gardener Sharon Slack supervised the collection of vegetables and herbs, and provided the kids with a huge lesson in what lies beyond our supermarket shelves.

New book on Urban School Gardens

By Veronica Gaylie
Peter Lang Publishing
June 15, 2011

Veronica Gaylie, Ph.D., is a writer, teacher and author of The Learning Garden: Ecology, Teaching and Transformation.

This book explores the urban school garden as a bridge between environmental action and thought. As a small-scale response to global issues around access to food and land, urban school gardens promote practical knowledge of farming as well as help renew cultural ideals of shared space and mutual support for the organic, built environment. Through a comprehensive history of school garden practice rooted in Eastern industrial cities, to case studies from four Pacific Rim regions, this book examines the practice and culture of the urban school garden as a central symbol for environmental learning.

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Three weeks of training followed by eleven weeks of work experience with partner agencies

By Julia Thiessen
EYA
May 3, 2011

A landmark internship has just drawn to a close, with ten local youth completing a unique urban agriculture work experience program. This program offered the opportunity for hands-on learning in the budding field of urban agriculture – and get paid for it! For the youth in the program this opportunity was not only a unique chance to  delve into organizations making a difference in the community, but also a chance to address their own barriers to finding fulfilling work in the future.

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“One of my goals for Truck Farm PDX is to show people that growing food can be doable, fun and easy.”

By Chad Walsh
Neighborhood Notes
Apr 11, 2011

Excerpt:

Late last fall, Tom Myers bought the farm—the literal kind, not the proverbial one. But it wasn’t your typical farm, either.

More accurately, he bought a white 2002 Ford Ranger. At the time, this truck served as his transportation to and from Abernethy Elementary School, where—through AmeriCorps and Northwest Service Academy—he teaches kindergarteners through fifth-graders sustainable gardening and nutrition classes, and he heads the school’s kitchen gardening program.

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School Children at class in the garden

Kristin Woodhouse
BCIT Magazine
April 14, 2011

Students in Richmond are learning about food production and sustainability, but it’s not in a conventional classroom.

The Terra Nova Schoolyard Project was founded in 2006 by Chef Ian Lai, an instructor at the Northwest Culinary Academy of Vancouver. Frustrated by his students’ lack of knowledge about how the food cycle works, he embarked on a quest to introduce children to where their food comes from.

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Adult gardening class has one green thumb in grade eight

Every year in March, our head gardener teaches classes on how to start an organic food garden. The students are always adults, but this year, one young person accompanied her mother and took copious notes.

In the video above she shares some of her thoughts on the class.

By Elizabeth McCorquodale
Black Dog Publishing
Spring 2011
96 pages, 257 colour and b/w ills
Kids in the Wild Garden follows on from the acclaimed Kids in the Garden, the new edition of which also releases in February 2011. Kids in the Garden is the perfect companion to Kids in the Wild Garden.

Haul your kids out of the post-Christmas slump in front of the TV and begin the New Year with fun in the fresh air with this brilliantly accessible guide to the great outdoors. Kids in the Wild Garden, following on from Kids in the Garden, is a fresh and playful book brimming with colourful ideas, experiments, projects, recipes and games for children of all ages.

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Planning and installing ten school gardens throughout the Springfield R-XII district

By Mark Miller
Drury University newsroom
January 4, 2011

Springfield, MO. Drury University and the Springfield Urban Agriculture Coalition (SUAC) have received a $300,000 grant from the Missouri Foundation for Health. The three-year grant will fund The Dig In R-Twelve (DIRT) Project, which will plan and install ten school gardens throughout the Springfield R-XII district. DIRT, in collaboration with the Drury School of Education, will also provide and teach curriculum to address core state education standards and use the gardens to complement classroom learning by teaching healthy habits in a fun, active, hands-on environment. The grant also includes funds to establish infrastructure for an urban farm in a low-income neighborhood.

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The s’Cool Food Initiative envisions the children of Santa Barbara County making healthy food choices throughout their lives.

The s’Cool Food Initiative is a project of the Orfalea Fund. In keeping with its long history of involvement in children’s health and education initiatives, the Orfalea Fund devoted the 2007-2008 school year to conducting a comprehensive, county-wide, school food needs assessment and educational campaign focusing on the connection between school food and the health of the community.

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The children were first shown how to loosen the soil and clearing it of stones

Organic Conversations blog
Dec. 2010

Excerpts:

For the last couple of weeks, some of us at the Bangalore Terrace Gardens (BTG) group had been discussing the possibility of community farming with children and today we finally made a start.

It was interesting to watch the children in such a setting. They were keen to help, yet unsure of how to proceed. As one mother shared, ‘ They are so eager to help then why are they being so hesitant to step on the soil or make furrows, etc?” And as we realised, it holds an important learning for us – that the disconnect between today’s children and the earth around them is so real that unless we make efforts like this to familiarise them with it, they will fail to see any connection at all.

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ESYNYC Announces the Grand Opening of the Garden at P.S. 216.

A conversation with Dan Wood, the WORKac architect about design, food and cities

By Alexandra Lange
The Change Observer
Nov. 17, 2010

Excerpts:

Dan Wood and Amale Andraos founded WORK Architecture Company in New York in 2003. Since 2003, their research and teaching have focused on paired questions about ecology and urbanism, food and design. They first explored these issues in three dimensions with their winning entry for the MoMA/PS1 Young Architects Program in 2008: PF1, or “Public Farm 1,” a reinvention of the summer pavilion as a working farm made of cardboard tubes. The process of putting that installation together is the subject of the small book Above the Pavement, The Farm! Architecture & Agriculture at PF1, published this year by Princeton Architectural Press.

As a result of that project, they were hired to design the first Edible Schoolyard New York with Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation. The first phase of the schoolyard opened in October at P.S. 216 in Gravesend, Brooklyn. WORKac’s more architecturally ambitious kitchen classroom and mobile greenhouse will go into construction in 2011.

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Direct Marketing Alternatives in an Urban Setting: A Case Study of Seattle Youth Garden Works

By Mykel Taylor, Doug Young, and Carol Miles

Except from news release:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 25, 2010) — A case study published in the 2010 Journal of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Education by professors at Washington State University examines the challenges one organization faced in maintaining an urban market garden. The journal is published by the American Society of Agronomy.

Since 1995, Seattle Youth Garden Works (SYGW) has employed young homeless individuals or those involved in the juvenile justice system. SYGW offers teens and young adults the opportunity to work, develop social skills, and eventually find stable employment or return to school. Uniting social programs and urban agriculture has been used in many cities with the aim of reducing poverty and increasing food security.

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Gardeners in the Edible Schoolyard at Public School 216 in Brooklyn. Photograph by Ruby Washington.

There are 285 school gardens in New York City

By Sharon Otterman
New York Times
October 19, 2010

Excerpt:

There are already 285 school gardens in New York City, according to a recent state survey, part of a national school gardening trend. Most are small affairs, completely reliant on parent volunteers and teachers’ spare time, said Erica Keberle of Grow NYC, which coordinates school gardening projects around the city.

The P.S. 216 project, known as an Edible Schoolyard, is part of a second generation of gardens, which involve things like state-of-the art greenhouses, professional staff, large city grants, and ever-more-ambitious agendas.

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Ground Up Organics is a Seattle based project of the organization Creatives for Community or C4C. It’s focus is on teaching teenagers to be leaders in the green revolution and specifically in urban organic agriculture. This story originally aired on The Seattle Channel program City Stream.

Creatives4Community

Video by Len Davis and Penny Legate
Pangeality Productions

Creatives4Community believes the best way to ensure self-sufficiency and healthy communities is to work closely and authentically with those who will very shortly or have already been challenged to BE self-sufficient for their own survival; our teens and young adults.

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Victoriano de Costa Elementary School’s students. Farmers in their ‘fields’. Photo by David Hagerman

School gardens in the Philippines

By Robyn Eckhardt and David Hagerman
Eating Asia
2010.09.03
Wonderful website – wonderful photos. Mike

Excerpt:

Long before Alice Waters introduced the concept of students growing their own food in Berkeley kids were putting hoe to soil at schools in the Philippines. School farms in the island nation go back at least to World War II. Many were, and still are, born of necessity. Others are started not only to feed kids but to teach them life skills and engender a respect for farming.

Didn’t know about this? I’m not surprised. We wouldn’t know about the Philippines’ own ‘edible schoolyards’ either had we not stumbled upon the farm at Victoriano de Castro Elementary School in Santa Rita, Pampanga province while on assignment there in December 2007 for Saveur magazine.

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Children’s writer Michael Morpurgo and his wife Clare founded farms for city children in 1976 at Nethercott, deep in Devon river country. They now operate three working farms: Treginnis Isaf on the Pembrokeshire coast opened twenty years ago and Wick Court in Gloucestershire opened in 1997. They aim to expand the horizons of children from towns and cities all over the country by offering them a week in the countryside living together on one of their farms. Illustration by Brian Gallagher.

Once upon a life

By Michael Morpurgo
The Observer
11 July, 2010

Michael Morpurgo and his wife were determined to change the lives of inner-city children by giving them an experience they’d never forget. The poet and author recalls how they started their first kids’ farm in Devon – and how one of the visiting children inspired his greatest literary work.

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