Overview

Why is gardening an important skill for a person to have?  There are many benefits to gardening.  One benefit to gardening is the end result: food!  However, there are also many other benefits, such as creating community with like minded individuals, vitamin D exposure, lowering anxiety levels, increasing productivity, and sparking creativity, just to name a few.  

Combining Gardening with English makes sense!  In order to LEARN about gardening, reading and writing needs to be done.  Someone who is learning about a subject reads about or watches informative videos about how to carry out a task or procedure.  This individual also writes about their learning by writing about the task or procedure and reflecting on the task or procedure.  Combining these two topics (Gardening and English) gives students a real world example of how multiple subjects can fit together...and they are learning great life skills in the process!

 Quotes from Past Garden Lit Students

"With gardening weather right around the corner I am excited to take my knowledge from this class and create my own garden at home. I am most excited to have the different varieties of fruits and vegetables right in my backyard."

"This year I am very excited to work in the garden. In and out of school I like working in the garden and watching things grow. My dad and I hope to start a large garden in the summer of this year. My family wants to start growing fruits and vegetables. I hope we can grow many things such as strawberries, bell peppers, snap peas, and cucumbers. We have never had a garden before and I only have experience with small house plants. I can't wait to take on this project and start eating food that we grow for ourselves." 

Learning to Care for the Garden 

Whether planting seeds, picking produce, weeding the garden, or string trimming, students are learning how to care for the garden and care for the community.  Much of the food that we grow in our garden plots are used in our school cafeteria or in our own classroom.  Caring for the beds of others helps our students to show compassion to the community around them, ultimately becoming connected with the community of gardeners present in the Ovid Community Garden.

 Growing Indoors 

This year the South Seneca Farm to School (F2S) team was able to participate in a program called Farm to Institute New York State (FINYS).  This year long program helped to give our team the support and resources that we needed to jump start a great F2S program in our middle and high school and also gave us funds to implement this program.  One of our purchases was three grow towers that were assembled, planted, and maintained by the Garden Lit class.  Grow towers were placed around the building: one in Mrs. Parsons' classroom in the high school, one in Ms. Clearman's classroom in the middle school, and one in the cafeteria.  All students were able to experience the grow towers in one of these three locations.  

As a class we learned so much about growing with this grow tower system.  This system is an aeroponic system, meaning that there is a period of time where the water runs over the roots of the plant and there is a period of time where there is no water running over the roots.  Maintenance on these systems requires filling the basin with water (many times carrying buckets of water to the system), adding liquid nutrients to the system based on how much water was added (using math--knowing how much water is added using a marked bucket, and then calculating how much of the nutrient is needed), and then checking the pH of the water (using science skills-and then adjusting the pH if necessary to make the best living environment for the plants).  Students also need to prune plants, support plants, and harvest fruits and greens.  Many times students enjoyed making treats from these harvests, such as a salad with lettuce greens, kale salad, and swiss chard sautéed in broth.  These grow towers were a hit, to say the least!

We grew a variety of plants in the grow towers in the 2021-22 year.  

L to R: 1. Marigolds, 2. The cafeteria tower that contained tomatoes, swiss chard, lettuce, and basil, 3. Fresh Tomatoes, and 4. Wheat.