Orchard Garden Workshop #5, April 29 : Morris Dancing, Seed Library, Cook-Telling workshop!

We had a great workshop yesterday, despite the onset of rain!

Tiddley Cove Morris Dancers & Musicians taught traditional dances and songs centred around the agricultural year -- Speed the Plough, Lively Jig, Country Life and Hal and Tow. Everyone got the chance to try a dance and some songs, and to think about incorporating arts-based approaches and seasonal, agri/cultural traditions in garden-based learning.

Wendy Traas from the UBC Education Library launched the new UBC Seed Library with us. She introduced us to the concept of seed-sharing and seed-saving through the Library, and as a bonus, gave us all packets of lovely seeds to take home and plant!

Everyone brought an evocative ingredient to the Cook-Telling workshop. We told our food stories about the ingredients we brought, and then combined them with staple ingredients like lentils, pasta, chick peas and one onion that we shared to improvise some very delicious and healthy vegetarian lunch dishes, with some unlikely but yummy combinations. (French Camembert cheese, Korean red pepper paste, Indian spices and Italian olives, anyone? It turned out great!)

Three more workshops are planned for this year -- mark them on your calendar!
#6: May 13 (planned and led by the secondary CFE group)
#7: June 10 (flax and linen processing from Orchard Garden flax, led by Rebecca Graham of EartHand Gleaners)
#8: June 24 (planned and led by the elementary/middle years CFE group)

Friday April 28th

Circumambulating the UBC Botanical Gardens

                BEWARE the gate below. Once you step through there is no going back. The things you learn and the sights you witness are real and they are wondrous. If you are willing to expand your knowledge and test your endurance than please venture through the gate and circumambulate the UBC Botanical Garden with me.

                        

Welcome! Please follow me to the Food Garden. This is an important area because it allows a space for the survival of all. Not only are edible plants such as Swiss Chard grown here but they are also sent forth into the world to create wellness. All of the food grown in this section of the Botanical Gardens is donated to the homeless. While it is slightly barren at this time of the growing season, we have high hopes for the remainder of the summer.

Before we move on, I would like to remind you that this is a garden, so please feel free to stop and smell the items that are growing in it.

                                

The Physic Garden is a place of wellness.

While one may not look at this space and think “YES! I have finally found a medicinal remedy that is available at a low cost and relatively easy to ingest.” That is exactly what you will experience once you take a gander through this greenery. Some of these herbs aide in removing headaches, some work to decrease the libido, while others help with digestive issues. The pills available from your doctor may even have a starting point with some of these medicinal plants!

 

Do not forget to check the time as we have other important adventures to follow after lunch!

                                  

*If you struggle with the reading of a sun dial please feel free to ask your local Botanical Garden CFE student to assist you.

Sasha Forster

Brendan Stanford-Botanical Gardens and Crop Rotations: Friday, April 28th

     The first week in the Orchard Garden has already come to a close, and we ended it with a spectacular visit to UBC's botanical garden. We were greeted and led to an ocean view deck and met up with other CFE students working at the botanical garden who felt just as delighted as we did to be working in outdoor education. The morning was spent discussing traditional ecological knowledge, the forms and applications of different educational gardens, and our role as future educators striving to foster the simultaneous love of and reverence for outdoor flora.

     After a relaxing lunch in the botanical garden, we returned to the Orchard Garden to work with Julian. We were going to prepare the Orchard Garden plant beds for the introduction of new root crops, but first, we had to flip the soil of each bed and add our organic mushroom fertilizer.

     I thought flipping the soil to prepare it for new plant growth was a beautiful analogy for my teaching experience during the practicum.  As we would disturb each bed, what had been a neat structure would become loose and initially incoherent, but this was necessary to incorporate what material was necessary for new growth (the fertilizer). After some hard work, the beds are rebuilt and the new material evenly distributed throughout the soil, and each bed is ultimately healthier for new plants to flourish in. Similarly, I found that the most essential concepts in a unit I would teach would initially disturb what had been a coherent set of ideas for my students, but that this disturbance was ultimately necessary for the students to develop their conceptual perspective.

     This cycle of disturbance, incorporation and enrichment encapsulates my idea of the growth mindset we seek to foster in our students, and that we must continue to nurture ourselves. The garden abounds not only with context to illustrate curriculum concepts and big ideas but with potential experiences that enhance one's reverence for life and the process of development. One cannot fully appreciate the work invested in a beautiful life by seeing a snapshot of it; notions of a famous author, entrepreneur or scientist are just as two-dimensional as a photo of an apple tree in bloom. It is only when we have invested in the struggle towards that end and persevered through uncomfortable disturbance that one can see the end in all of its true beauty. At least in the garden, we finish every day seeing how our efforts improve it and enhance its beauty, and over the course of the school year, these small efforts and investments of ours will come to enrich the community as the garden's crops flourish.

If we can facilitate the same experiences for our students that help foster their growth mindsets, then we empower them to invest in and enhance not only the beauty of their life but the beauty of their community by extension. There may be hard work ahead, but the fruits of the labour will be well worth it.

Orchard Garden CFE April 27

Joyce - Classroom Gardens

We started off our morning with a lively discussion on an article by Green Teacher called "The Roots of Diversity: Growing Culturally Significant Plants in the Classroom". We began our discussion with any questions we had regarding the article.

The article talks about celebrating diversity in the classroom by growing culturally significant plants together as a class. By growing plants and creating a nice windowsill garden in the classroom, we can engage the students in many ways. As plants can play an important role in many cultural traditions and rituals around the world, they serve as a useful resource for studying different cultures. We can use the plants in the classroom to explore their point of origins as well as the different stories they may have. I personally thought the article was a great read and provided a lot of helpful information on starting a classroom garden. After reading the article, I got excited about starting my own classroom garden and started thinking about the potential ways I could approach it based on my two teachable subjects.

Some of the questions that came up were regarding how we can find stories behind plants from a reliable source, how we can make deeper cultural connection between us and plants and solutions for classrooms that have limited exposure to light. We then started coming up with ideas for the use of classroom gardens for different subject areas. For example for Business classes, teachers can plan a food marketing unit which requires them to do project research and ultimately setting up their own garden. 

Featuring Colin's Bouba the rabbit and Kiki the duck

Next we had John introducing us to soundscaping by doing a quick activity. He got us to draw two shapes onto a piece of paper and told us to name our beautifully drawn shapes either Bouba or Kiki. It resulted in all of us having the same answer! We all knew the rounded shape just had to be Bouba and the spiky shape was a definite Kiki. We then watched a video on soundscaping explaining how the majority of people associated Bouba with the rounded shape due to the sound of the word. Our mouths makes more of a rounded shape when we say Bouba and an angular shape when we say Kiki.




Danielle – Forest Soundscape

After our morning discussion, we headed down to the small forest near the Orchard Garden where John led us through a soundscape activity. We each had a clipboard, a piece of paper, and a pencil. 



First, we spent 20 minutes alone listening to all the sounds of the forest. While we listened, we tried to draw what we think the sounds would look like on our paper. We had three categories of sounds to draw: human, nature, and technology. At this time and place, the reality was that the natural sounds of birds and rustling tree branches were overpowered by the aggressive construction noises.

After our 20 minutes of listening, we regrouped and walked back to the Orchard Garden. There, we got into groups of 3 and shared our drawings with our group members. It was interesting to see the differences in how people visualize sounds, which is not something most of us are used to doing. In our small groups, we were given a larger piece of paper and asked to combine our drawings to make a larger soundscape. The final part of this activity was to choreograph a live rendition of our group’s drawing. We found sticks and tools from the garden to try to re-enact the noises we heard in the forest.  

Next came the fun part – watching the performances of each group. Creativity was maximized with the use of voices and gardening instruments made to sound like birds and heavy machinery. I can see how students of all ages would enjoy the creativity of this activity. As we were doing the different parts to this soundscape – the listening, drawing, and group collaboration, I could see how adaptable this activity could be. It could easily be done with children and students of all ages, in virtually any environment. It could be a warm-up to garden learning or just a simple field trip outside where students get to use their senses in new ways. Teachers could lead their students through a sound walk or a sound sit somewhere near the school and then do various follow up activities. I think students would enjoy the sensory experience and feel more connected to the space around them. All in all, it was a very interesting experience!

To end our day today, we spent a couple hours weeding in the sunny garden. There's something about getting your hands in the dirt and breathing in fresh air that puts everyone in a good mood. I personally am loving it, and I am hoping that all of our future students will be able to appreciate how different they feel when they leave the stuffy classroom and spend time outside. 

CFE Garden safety sheets & medicinal herbs primer, FYI

Here are links to some handouts from our CFE, so that everyone will be able to access these online as

well as on paper:

1) Orchard Garden & Cultivating Learning Network garden health & safety sheet

2) Orchard Garden medicinal herbs primer 

3) Further information about beneficial dead-nettles (lamium purpureum)

Note: After our tour of the Physic Garden at the Botanical Garden today, I came across this interesting news item about a medical research team studying medieval recipes for cures in order to discover little-known new antibiotics. Fascinating!

Orchard Garden CFE April 26

Jenny - School gardens in other countries and cultures

For our morning session, we had a guest speaker, Kwesi, who shared about the school gardens in other countries and cultures - in particular, Ghana.

We started off by learning about the history of school gardens in Ghana. It was interesting to see how gardening and farming are very well embedded into people’s daily lives. Even in terms of education, elementary and high school are mandated to have school gardens in Ghana. We looked at an example of a grade 7 science project where students have to grow a named vegetable crop from seed to harvesting. It showed that the Ghanaian education system aims to really encourage garden-based learning by providing a curriculum that revolves around students physically working in the school gardens.

Then we had a discussion about how gardening is different across cultures. Specifically, there was an interesting conversation about how in some cultures, people tend to have dominance over nature by controlling where to grow things, what to grow, how it must be designed, etc. On the other hand, in other cultures, people appreciate the randomness of nature and just let the nature decide on its own.

As well, we also conversed about how different ingredients brings significance to different people. When Kwesi showed us some photos of the trees and crops in Ghana, it was hard for us to recognize and identify what they were because we weren’t familiar with those ingredients. However, they will have a great significance to the Ghanaian people because they depend on those things in their daily lives. It is similar to how Korean people will depend heavily on rice and Korean cabbage (for kimchi) because they are a part of our daily diet whereas it might not be that significant to people from other cultures.

Overall, it was a great session where we got to see a real example of how Ghanaian education system has adopted garden-based learning to its core level and see the great outcomes it has on the students.

Benefits/Outcomes of Garden-Based Learning (as mentioned by Kwei):

• Some students replicated the school garden in their homes and in the future, they will be able to earn a living (life-long learning)
• The produce were distributed to the children at the end of each harvest
• Children learned to appreciate the value of vegetables in a balanced diet
• Symbol of collaboration between the school and the community

Colin - Tour of Windermere school gardens, greenhouse, composting and orchard

Courtyard Garden

The Green House

In the afternoon session, we went to Windermere Secondary School to have a tour of their school gardens, led by three of the students responsible for running the spaces, allowing us to see school gardens in a local context.

The tour started in a school courtyard where there is a green house, plant beds, along with bushes and trees.  Our guides started by showing us their green house where they get seedlings started on their journey.  It was immediately clear the amount of work that our guides and their fellow students have put into the garden projects, and also the pride that they take in the work they have done.  The projects are student led, through the leadership classes, making the students responsible for planning and implementation of projects and ideas.

Raspberry bushes

After we toured the green house, we continued on to the rest of the courtyard garden, seeing the many plant beds, and raspberry bushes that provide healthy, local food, to the school cafeteria during the growing season.  Because the harvest for some of the plants grown does not coincide with the school schedule, the leadership class has previously organized for the bounty of fresh produce to help the local community, arranging for local charities to make use of the produce.

Solitary Bee Homes

Community and school engagement was a constant theme throughout the tour.  With our guides talking about the garden spaces not only providing food, but also providing a space where learning can happen outside of the classroom.  Where plays for english or drama can be performed, where physical education involves creating and working in the gardens, where you can learn about the needs of solitary bees, and create an art.

The Orchard Garden

After visiting the courtyard garden, we toured the orchard garden, where there were a variety of fruit trees and bushes, and well as even more plant beds.  Occupying a corner of the sports field, in-between a road and a baseball diamond, the space is being utilized in a very nice way.  Providing more food, opportunities for different approaches to gardening, and once again community engagement with signage that informs and engages.

Signs in the orchard

Overall, it was a very successful, inspiring tour.  The passion and dedication that our tour guides had for their projects was evident, and is something that all of us will try to replicate throughout out teaching careers