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Five Rivers MetroParks staff members share helpful advice for creating a sustainable food supply as well as stories from local farmers and news from the front lines of the local food movement.

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Home > Blogs > Farm Life and Local Harvest > Archives > 2012 > February > 11

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Big News in School Gardening!

By Kasey Henneman | Saturday, February 11, 2012, 10:04 AM

Schoolyard gardening isn’t new, but it is bearing quite a sensational re-emergence. One of the best, and largest documented cases of schoolyard gardening took place in New York City in the early 1900’s.

Fannie Griscom Parsons started the Children’s School Farm right in Manhattan, with- you guessed it, very eager and willing kids. Link here to read an article in the Huffington post by Daniel Bowman of SNAP Gardens. Looking forward, school gardening has once again gained fervent national support. In fact, right here in Dayton, Cleveland Elementary, The Boy and Girls Club, and Our Secret Garden, are all youth education gardens (Link here to Five Rivers MetroParks community gardens webpage to download a map (button on the right) to these gardens and other community gardens in the Montgomery County).

Although there have been major leaps in school garden participation, the gardens have met obstacles when asking to include the fresh garden produce in school lunches. For a seemingly straight forward concept; school garden (exercise and education) + harvest in school lunches (inexpensive, high nutrition) = healthy kids; practicality was getting lost in legality- and the efforts were (usually) halted.

So what’s the big news?

On January 25, First Lady Michelle Obama and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack unveiled new standards for school meals. Inside the new standards are guidelines to USE school garden produce! Link here to the USDA webpage listing these new revisions.

Hip-hip-hooray! This brings relief to frustrated school gardeners who now can teach the entire lesson of gardening, that is; growing the food you eat. In addition to minimizing the ‘hoop jumping’ for school gardeners , these standards offer easy to follow guidelines for the beginning school gardener.

Some states, like Oregon have had less opposition when wanting to add school grown produce to school lunch, link here to read a salad bar success story (photo below).

Want to be regularly updated on the National Farm to School news? Link here their homepage and sign up for the newsletter.

Interested in starting a school garden? Read up! Link here to Real School Gardens, here to a recent article published by the University of Illinois Extension on school gardening, here to a follow up article in the Huffington Post on school gardening examples and resources, and always feel free to contact us at the Five RIvers MetroParks community gardening office with questions at kasey.henneman@metroparks.org or lucille.beachdell@metroparks.org

Thanks for reading!

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