A teacher's journey in the garden

The Orchard Garden is fortunate to have two students (one from the Faculty of Education and one from the Faculty of Land and Food Systems) doing service-learning work with us.  One of these students is brand new to gardening and has chosen to document her learning over the course of the next few months on this blog.  It is with pleasure that I introduce Tia!  We look forward to reading about your explorations, questions and learning as a means to connect to other teachers interested in garden-based learning.

Greetings to all!

My name is Tia and I am a full time Master of Education in Early Childhood Education student at UBC. I feel fortunate to have been given the unique opportunity to participate in service learning as part of one of my courses this semester (EDCP 585). I will be volunteering and taking part in the meetings and activities organized by the Orchard Garden this semester and I really do hope to stay involved after the semester is over! I plan to work on my graduating project this summer and am very interested in outdoor learning and environmental education Specifically, I will be writing about the forest kindergarten movement. I recently began volunteering at an outdoor forest preschool program and am really enjoying it!

I am embarrassed to admit that I really don’t have any real experiences BEING outdoors or doing “outdoorsy” things. I have never gardened, hiked or really explored nature even though I feel very passionate about the importance of having these experiences in childhood and throughout the life span. Sadly, I am not from BC, I am from Windsor, Ontario so perhaps this has something to do with my lack of outdoor experiences. I had the opportunity to attend a planning meeting for the Orchard Garden recently and was very surprised to see how much I really didn’t know about gardening. I have always been very interested in gardening, even trying to grow my own seeds in my backyard over the years…but nothing really ever grew! I hope to learn what I have been doing wrong.

To give the blog readers a sense of how much I really need to learn here are few terms mentioned at the meeting in which I know nothing about and really don’t even know what they mean.

Term 1: Irrigation, Term 2: Mushroom manure, Term 3: Composting

These are just a few things I predict I will know a lot more about very soon! I am looking forward to this learning adventure and hope to be of some help to the Orchard Garden volunteers. I like to think that I am not alone out there and that there are many city girls like me who grew up playing inside most of the time and know very little about growing things! If people like me are reading, let’s learn together!

Here is a photo of myself and my vase of fake sunflowers that I keep on my kitchen table…I should really get some real plants in my apartment!