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At the Farm Aid site there is a Farm-to-School 101 Toolkit that can guide your efforts to establish relationships between your school and local farmers. The toolkit outlines 7 steps for getting started, gives some interesting case studies, has a FAQ section to help brainstorm and has a list of tools and resources.

Gardens are great

We always say that school gardens can be used to teach anything across the curriculum, and here is a very poignant case in point. At North Adams School in Massachusetts students have donated 232 pounds of produce to the Berkshire Food Project. This is the product of their school gardens and of their study of local social issues relating to hunger and access to healthy food. They also learn and write about growing their crops. Read about it in this article from The Berkshire Eagle.

It's magic!

There's a School Garden Wizard! This supports your vision of a school garden with the necessary tools to make it a success. There are steps for building a team, designing, getting funds and supplies, learning the basics, planting, activities, resources, teaching and sustaining your garden. Plus lots of photos and wonderful ideas.

The history of a school garden

At Lewis Elementary School in Portland, OR the school garden includes greenhouses, composting bins, raised beds, barrels for rainwater harvesting and an outdoor classroom. This garden is used for all sorts of education and it is a peaceful relaxing spot as well. This garden was started small and has progressed following the ideas and needs of the school itself. There are teachers, parents, students and community volunteers hard at work, building a successful garden that can meet the very specific needs of the school. Read about the Lewis garden at Edutopia.

Beginning farmers

At the blog Beginning Farmers, there is a wealth of information available to all kinds of farmers as well as educators and supporters of farms. They offer a wide variety of information with special emphasis on sustainable farming, organic farming, direct marketing and local food systems. This is a good resource for farmers and for others who want to know about them. It has a wealth of articles that would be great for student research.

Five winners announced in "Kids are Growing"

This year’s winning schools for the “Kids are Growing” contest sponsored by the International Greenhouse Co, Washington State Potato Commission, PCC Natural Markets and King 5 were Concordia Lutheran in Tacoma, Graham Hill Elementary in Seattle, Cedarhurst Elementary in Burien, Rainier Elementary in Rainier and Explorer Community School in Redmond.
Each school had to complete an entry binder that detailed what a greenhouse would do for them: how they would use it and what they could learn from it. They also had to submit an original, healthy potato recipe.
The prizes for each school were an 8’x 8’ EasyGrow greenhouse kit, a $1000 grant from the Washington State Potato Commission, and a $500 grant and garden supplies from PCC Natural Markets.
The winning schools will use these prizes to grow food for school lunches and community food banks and to learn about healthy food choices and how food grows.

Auburn School District's Fabulous Garden Project

Auburn High School has a great fruit tree and greenhouse garden project and it's in the news!

The garden project is the brainchild of Eric Boutin, School Nutrition Services Director at Auburn School District (and regular attendee of the Farm to School Connections Team meetings). Inspired by the Edible School Yard project in Berkeley, he's working with community partners like Bastyr University and Cascadian Ediuble Landscapes to make it happen. With greenhouses and a dwarf fruit tree orchard, the garden inhabits a one acre lot between Auburn High School and an elementary school. Food from the gardens will be included in school lunches. I hope this project can serve as a model for other schools--we'll watch the progress and hopefully create a more detailed case study soon!

Student-Grown Produce in Connecticut Schools

Students in Bloomfield, Connecticut and the surrounding area are coming together to grow produce, raise chickens for eggs, and even raise tilapia fish for the school district's cafeterias. Tim Cipriano, the District's recently hired food services manager, worked with Joe Rodrigues at the Donald F. Harris Sr. Agri-Science & Technology Center to create an agriculture program that feeds students educationally and nutritionally. For more info, read Steven Goode's article Food For Students From Students in the online Hartford Courant.