SCHOOL GARDENS
Hat’s off and shovels down to Michelle Obama for setting the example for growing our own food.
What a concept for starting a health program. Getting in touch with the beginnings – from seeds to something good to eat.
My first experience with a garden that schooled me, was at a small seaside town on the Left Coast where I apprenticed to an eccentric garden keeper and I fell in love. In love with watering in tiny lettuce, digging beds, building 6-foot high compost beds. I fell in love with the spirit of it all. Watching flowers dance in the wind, smelling succulent herbs and tasting the lettuce I grew myself, well, with everyone else, I was in heaven. For this city girl whose only connection with plants was an indoor potted palm, being in the garden and living in nature brought me to a deeper heart of life. and Spirit.
A new health plan that everyone should be able to agree upon starts with each school growing a garden, kids learning from the ground up about food and nourishment. This goes into education and long-term prevention of obesity and other health-problems. This is a preventive model, one step at a time., one seed at a time.
We can take a kid out of the city or the gangs, one garden at a time. I have fantasized for years – WHAT IF – what if we could feed every child on the planet – with food and love, then what? As I reach into my legacy years I am committed to helping make that happen, one breath at a time.
The reality about gardens and schools - Sonoma County is a wonderful model with their School Garden Network which has a whole curriculum developed and putting it into action. I will post here and at my blog about the latest and greatest. Please tell us what you are doing around school food.
One school, Salmon Creek is the model for Sonoma county – when they began cooking from their garden, their school lunches generatated $6000 more in school lunches that last year.
Here’s one reason why – “I like to eat because we grow it, ”says 2nd grader, Oak Grove School
Find out in your community what is being done about school gardens. It had been a mandate of California legislature.