In the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 school year, a series of schools who received Farm to School BC Start-Up Grants were asked to write a short story describing their process to date in building their Farm to School programs. The stories below are a reflection of the creativity, ingenuity and hard work of schools across the province in building Farm to School programs that work for their school and their community. No one size fits all, enjoy!
Apples and Berries We’re so glad that our students had an opportunity to eat and interact with fresh fruit grown on the farms in our community. We focussed on apples and berries because they were both readily available in our area. The berries could be frozen for use during the winter and our students loved the crispy […]
Well, shoot for the stars, they say- and we did. We came to this project with a lofty vision, four women, a classroom of wonderful children and oodles of excitement. Our vision was to create a hands-on, interactive, fun, food literacy learning resource for our class, our school, and our community. As with every grand […]
The Royal Bay Secondary Garden….Our Story The garden at Royal Bay Secondary began as a small piece of criteria on an RFP for our school plan. Once we had agreement from the architects to include a garden in the plans, we waited patiently while the school was being constructed. With so many other, traditional aspects […]
First of all, we need to come clean about the fact that we haven’t done THE priority identified for our Farm to School BC grant- a commercial dishwasher. Nevertheless, 2016 has been a year of great success! How can that be? Well, we didn’t need a dishwasher after all; what we needed was relationship-building and […]
Our garden adventures at our elementary and highschool in Clearwater already had a long history before we embarked on our Farm to School program. Six years ago at Raft River Elementary, our PAC initiated a project where each classroom started 6 packs of tomatoes and peppers from seed. This was the true beginning of a […]
Smithers Secondary School is located ~800 km north of Vancouver BC. Our outdoor frost-free season for vegetables typically spans from the end of May to the Middle of September. This poses a particular challenge to a school as much of the normal growing season takes place outside of school time. As a result food production […]
At the Wells-Barkerville Elementary School we are very excited and proud of our new School Greenhouse which we were able to build with the funding from Farm to School BC last summer. The Wells Community Garden has partnered with the School in previous years to grow potatoes (amoung other crops) at the Community Garden which […]
Telkwa School’s Farm to School grant was used to start up a fruit leather making project. We are a small school with just over 100 students from mixed rural and town families. We live in a part of the province which has frost from October to May (read that as WINTER for 5 months!) […]
Two classrooms began gardening in 2014. Good things grow and grow we did! This year we have five classrooms with 125 students enthusiastically pulling weeds, preparing beds with new soil, learning about bad bugs and good bugs, getting hands and clothes muddy during planting and selling starters at the community Spring Fair to raise money […]
This has been an exciting adventure and we are super proud of the progress we have made! First of all the decision to follow through and continue the process when we weren’t sure if this even was a possibility. The most valuable lesson so far learnt by the children was that building a garden is not […]