Greenhorn to (almost) Green Thumb

Delicious daikon - from garden to table

Gardens are welcoming places full of life. Yet they can be intimidating as well, for those who have little knowledge or experience with gardening. This described my situation as I began my practicum at the Orchard garden; I was definitely more of a greenhorn than a green thumb.

But in the past few days, I have learned so much just by being in the garden and assisting with the various stages of agriculture. From seeding to weeding to harvesting to composting- I experienced many different aspects of gardening.

Creating community through school gardening

I have spent the last week in the Orchard Garden working with a group of fellow teacher candidates from the UBC Faculty of Education to develop strategies for the implementation of school gardens in different school environments. We have also worked to maintain the Orchard Garden by weeding and working with compost, as well as harvesting food crops for Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and for several celebration activities that have taken place in the Orchard Garden.

Vivian's views: all things soil

Meet our new pets - in the vermicompost bin!

I am a UBC Teacher Candidate and I started my field experience at the Orchard Garden just this past week. I would like to share some of my experiences and reflection from this week:

In one workshop, Julia asked us to write down a list of words that comes to mind when you think of “soil”. The reason why Julia chose soil was because it is something that many people know about (as opposed to, for example, a name of a plant). For me, I have very limited knowledge of gardening but coming up with words associated with soil was something that I could do, whether these words are biologically or symbolically related. Likewise, this is what I would do in a classroom with students – activate

Summer Celebration 2013

Last Tuesday, the Orchard Garden welcomed guests to the garden for the 3rd Annual Summer Celebration. With the help of 6 fantastic enhanced practicum students (teachers to-be, participating an informal learning situation), we put together a great program. 

Heather and Vivian harvesting kohlrabi

Student teachers prepare for the garden party: Week 2

Karine works in the herb garden

This week we worked at planning The Summer Celebration event that will be at the Orchard Garden on Tuesday, June 25 from 12-2pm. The difficulty we had in planning this event is that we are unsure about the number of people who will be visiting and/or the age range of the visitors. We therefore decided to go with activities that would be interesting for a wide range of ages and easy to adapt for various audiences. The plan is to have a tea table by our newly revamped herb garden where we will be serving both hot and iced teas made out of the herbs in the garden. We also planned an art table using materials from the garden, a food table where we will be serving food from the garden, a storytelling space under a special mulberry tree, and a bugs' life table at which we will be discussing the roles of bees and other bugs in the garden. Hopefully, we will have enough visitors to promote this really cool educational garden. 

Week One: A Teacher Candidate in the garden

The poppies in the Garden...

I am a UBC Teacher Candidate starting my field to fork to field community experience and I have to say this first week has gone by really quickly. At the beginning of the week we met all the lovely people of the Orchard Garden and of the Think and Eat Green projects who shared their passion for the environment, gardening, food sustainability and children with us. After familiarizing ourselves with our own little section of project, we were sent to our own placements, which for me was the Orchard Garden and gave us lots of latitude to decide the nature of our own project. 

Enhanced Practicum Take 2

Last week, the Orchard Garden welcomed our three elementary school teacher practicum students. They will be working with us for the next three weeks in workshops and hands-on garden work as part of learning about teaching in an informal setting. We are running workshops on many things, from local garden histories, to how to start a school garden. And of course, lots of digging in the dirt.

New to teaching? Gardening? No problem!

Check out one of our Orchard Garden workshop participants' blog postings on bringing gardens into the classroom during her teaching practicum.
http://sdalzell6.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/gardening/ 

Great to see this enthusiasm & fearlessness. Teaching on practicum can be overwhelming all on its own, so to bring garden-based education into the mix is really inspiring.

Congratulations, Sarah! Let us know how it all went.
Julia

The Orchard Garden from the Perspective of two B.Ed students

Beauty. Peacefulness. Tranquility. Colour. Diversity. Abundance. All these words described our first impression of the Orchard Garden. What is this place in the middle of the hustle and bustle of campus life? A place of such freshness, where biodiversity can be seen, heard, felt, and smelled—all five minutes by foot from Scarfe!

Our time in the Orchard Garden has been filled with exploration and learning, in a sense a great mirror of the education process itself. We began our time by investigating the many facets of the garden, using the informative workshop series documents created by the Orchard Garden team. These followed the entire food cycle: from prepping the garden beds, to growth, to harvest, to preparing and eating a meal, and finally returning the end products to the compost bin—so they could become soil anew.