Instructional Garden, Farm, & Pizza Oven
The Greenhouse
One remarkable feature of The Center is The District’s own on-site greenhouse. Because of the greenhouse’s expanded capacity we have been able to develop a robust Seed and Start Program that is offered to schools across the District. School-site Garden Stewards (stipended school staff who commit to maintaining and engaging community in school site garden spaces) request seasonal and curriculum-aligned seeds and starts for planting, learning and harvesting at their school sites. These offerings are matched with the OUSD School Garden Planting Calendar and the OUSD School Garden Toolkit. The items for order reflect seasonal and culturally diverse produce offerings that can be easily grown in the Bay Area and our schools. Center staff and our partner, UC Cooperative Extension Master Gardeners, work together to curate and grow the plants, care for them, and assemble the seed and start requests. We have served 57 discrete schools multiple times and provided 1299 volunteer-assembled seed packets and 2678 plant starts so far this year.
Instructional Garden
The instructional garden consists of 25 raised beds that are stewarded by our FoodCorps Members, site staff, students, and volunteers. We grow a variety of seasonal crops that we harvest and use in our student programming.