Teaching Culture and History With a School Garden

During our second week of the CFE practicum, Susan Gerofsky came to talk to Jan-Lin and I about Chinese Market Garden. The point behind this discussion is that history and culture can be integrated into the classroom via the garden. In the late 1800s, Chinese immigrants  and First Nations peoples who faced discrimination in Canada ended up creating a symbiotic relationship by growing vegetables and selling them at the market. We can still see evidence of this relationship in today's many Chinese-owned vegetable farms in the Lower Mainland, as well as in the many half-Chinese-half-Aboriginal children born in that era. 

We also looked at the book “Eating Stories,” which also highlighted the fact that there is a story related to almost everything we eat!

This discussion made me realize that everything in our food culture has a history. When we teach young people about gardening and growing their own food, we can always incorporate that history to create a more well-rounded lesson.

Examples of how history and culture can be taught via a school garden: 

The creation and proliferation of school garden itself teaches us much about modern food history. In a classroom, we can discuss urbanization, development of large-scale agriculture, and how that led to the growing disconnection between the food we eat and where it comes from. As we became more and more disconnected, people became discontent, and a movement to rekindle our relationship with food was started, which eventually led to school gardens, urban community gardens, and the farm-to-table movement.

We could also talk about history of certain vegetables and their role in our food culture in the past compared to today. For example, kale has become a “fashionable” vegetable in the past several years, and almost every school garden grows kale of some type. Ten years ago, however, most people didn’t eat kale or even knew what it was. As students grow kale in the school garden, we can incorporate a lesson about the history of kale and how some foods are more popular in some cultures, who made them popular, and how.

Evolution of agricultural methods can also be taught via the garden. In school gardens we do most tasks with our hands, but we can teach kids about how things are done differently at large-scale farms, the scientific evolution of agricultural technology, and the repercussions of that change.

Through this discussion with Susan, I have learned that there are endless connections between food and other aspects of our society. As teachers, we just have to look a little closer, dig a little deeper in order to make school gardens a more well-rounded resource for education.

CFE Week 1: Weed, Sow, Water, Repeat!

One of the most important jobs at the garden: watering!

                The Orchard Garden in UBC is a small plot of land located near Totem Park Residences. It is the home of numerous plant beds, a variety of herbs, a three-bin composting system, and numerous bee hives. For the next few weeks, this will also be the second home of Pailin and me, the two teacher candidates who are volunteering here for the CFE. We will be trained by a number of different experts from a number of different backgrounds for the next few weeks, learning a number of different skills.

On Monday, we convened with Susan, Toni, and Scott, who are a few of our teachers, and learned about possible safety hazards, the history of gardens and our schedule for the next few weeks. Then, we went to visit the Orchard Garden and learned about the multitude of herbs that flourish in the garden.

How many of these herbs can you identify?

Jagged-edged beet seeds

Tuesday was a beautiful sunny day, so we were excited to work in the garden in the afternoon. After learning about garden basics, food safety and intergenerational landed learning, we visited the Orchard Garden. We met Galen, one of the gardening experts at the Orchard Garden. She had a plan for how the garden should look which really helped to give us some direction and goals. Together, we uprooted the old kale (we gathered 3 wheelbarrows full!), weeded, prepared some beds and planted Chioggia beets. 

Delicious and tender harvested
kale from the children's
plant beds!

Instead of meeting in the Agora on Wednesday, we went to the UBC Farm and helped out with the intergenerational landed learning program. One of the goals for the landed learning program is for the older and more experienced farmers to close up the gap of knowledge by training up the upcoming generation with skills needed to take care of a garden.Elementary school students came to take care of the plant beds that were allotted to them. Together, I helped them with harvesting kale. Surprisingly, despite having grown the kale and being proud of it, the kids were very reluctant to bring the harvested kale home! So, I got to take half of the harvest home!

A healthy sorbet with
healthy toppings

The theme on Wednesday was water, and we learned how to make Compost Tea. Some of us were also involved in making the snack of the day: sorbet with dried ground cherries, toasted coconut flakes, dried concord grapes, freezer jam and mint leaves. It was amazing to learn that sorbet can be made so easily – all you need is a juicer and frozen fruit!

The afternoon found us back at the Orchard Garden weeding, preparing beds and planting swiss chard. I didn’t know this before, but swiss chard and beets are from the same family, so their seeds look very similar.

Myron showing us the three bin
composting system

On Thursday, we met at the Agora again to discuss research articles we had read about garden-based education. Our teacher today was Myron, who came from Belize and has a math background. One of the highlights includes learning about how there is apparently a strain of bacteria in soil called Mycobacterium vaccae that makes people happier because it triggers the release of serotonin which decreases anxiety and elevates mood. Another highlight was learning about how promoting gardening for youth also promotes healthier diets and exercise habits.

Our Aboriginal weaving
seed bag project

After our discussion in the morning, we headed down to the Orchard Garden for a day of plentiful weeding! Pailin and I are becoming experts at identifying common weeds. We also experienced the frustrations of having horsetail weeds growing in a plant bed – their roots seem to run for miles! We prepared three beds for planting broccoli, cauliflower and two types of kale.  We ended the day learning how to weave bags out of yarn. The connection between weaving bags and gardening is learning about how we can use the garden and harvest the materials not just for food, but for other things such as clothing and textiles.

Pailin raking the beds, readying
them for seed-sowing!

On Friday, Kwesi talked to us about his research on gardens in Ghana. It was interesting to learn that gardening is highly encouraged in Ghana; in fact, in order to encourage people to be indepedent, the government launched "operation feed yourself" where every family has its own garden and schools are encouraged to train students up to learn how to garden and harvest. What a smart idea! This philosophy reminds me of a certain proverb: "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."



I've really enjoyed this week so far. It is much slower-paced than the ten-week practicum that we just finished, but it has been very rewarding. At first it was daunting, thinking about how much work there was to do with weeding, planting and rearranging beds. But this week has shown me that gardening really is fun and rewarding, especially when done with great people. We set short term as well as long term goals which has helped to keep me motivated and interested. It is also satisfying to spend hours weeding and planting, then standing back to admire the fruit of our labour! I'm looking forward to the next few weeks at the Orchard Garden. 

Community Field Experience at the Orchard Garden Week 1

For 3 weeks, Jan-Lin and I are immersed in learning about gardening and garden-based education at the UBC Orchard Garden. We are both teacher candidates in the Home Economics program, and we are here for our Community Field Experience, which is an extension of our teaching practicum.

My biggest learning curve this week is getting my hands dirty in the garden. I have never gardened before, so it was truly refreshing and really enjoyable to learn a new skill! We started out by uprooting massive kale plants from last year to clear the beds for this season’s planting (I learned how to drive the wheelbarrow!). We then got busy with weeding and making the beds, which is what we spent most of our time doing this week. We also planted some beets, chard and two types of kale; I’m really looking forward to seeing them grow. 

Garden work is definitely serious exercise, but it’s also really satisfying at the end of the day when we look at what we’ve accomplished. It’s a welcome change of pace to be outside, taking our time working with nature, meeting worms, and saying hello to spiders—it makes me realize how “sheltered” my regular lifestyle is from all the world’s diversity of organisms.

Making snacks for the Intergenerational Landed
Learning Project at the UBC Farm

On Wednesday we visited the Intergenerational Landed Learning project at the UBC Farm, and got to witness and participate in a wonderful program where children and elders meet and collaborate in garden work. With my cooking background, I helped the kitchen with snack preparation. We made “sorbet” by putting nothing but frozen fruit (from the farm, of course) into a juicer, and out came a creamy, smooth healthy sorbet made with no added sugar…well, apart from the rhubarb sauce and the strawberry jam we put on top! But the most fascinating thing was seeing a complete cycle of food: the farm’s produce getting turned into food that feeds the very people who worked to grow them.

Today we met with the passionate and knowledgeable Kwesi Yaro to talk about school garden program in Ghana. Food production gardens were mandated for families and schools as a policy to help people become self-sufficient in times where food shortage was a national concern. In Canada, we may not have a food shortage crisis, but we may have a “food disconnection crisis” where people are no longer involved in anyway with the food that feeds them. I think growing your own food serves to remind us of our connection to our food and therefore the value of the land. 

Craft in the garden: Jan-Lin with her aboriginal
woven seed bag in the works, taught to us by Ozlem.

I’m leaving this week with a realization that school gardens are a multi-purpose resource, and people from various backgrounds can start gardens with different objectives that are relevant to their unique situation: instilling environmental awareness, promoting healthy eating, promoting physical activity, fostering connection with nature, using gardens as a resource for experiential learning, and of course, simply to feed people. 

Looking forward to week 2!

Making & then taking down the solargraph pinhole cameras at the Orchard Garden

Some photos about the 'making of' the six-month solargraphs:

Pinhole camera 1 (the black cylinder on the pole)

The view from camera 1

Camera 2

View from camera 2

Camera 3

The view from camera 3

Camera 4

Camera 4 again

View from camera 4

Ceremonial taking-down of the pinhole cameras at Winter Solstice 2014

R-L: Latika, Kwesi, and Latika's husband

L-R Laura and Phil

L-R: Susan, Latika, Laura

 Back in July: Meeting of the Orchard Garden team with George Hart and Nick Sayers to plan the math art in the garden projects.

L-R: George, Julia, Roz, Scott

L-R: Brendan, Claire, Galen

L-R: Toni, George, Julia

L-R: Claire, Galen, Nick

L-R: Scott, Brendan, Claire, Galen

Sample solargraphs that Nick made in Brighton, UK

Nick Sayers & UBC Orchard Garden six-month pinhole solargraphs!

When UK mathematical artist Nick Sayers did a residency at the Orchard Garden in July 2014, he taught PME conference participants and UBC Orchard Garden people how to make 6-month pinhole cameras from a pop can, to record the path of the sun from the summer solstice to the winter solstice. We put four of these cameras up in the garden in July (close to the summer solstice), and took them down on Dec. 22, 2014 (at the winter solstice). Here are the absolutely beautiful results! I think that the two that sustained some water damage are actually the most beautiful --- an example of wabi sabi. What do you think?