Eating Healthy Can Be Low Cost

Students in Pervasive Needs and Academic Science classes will learn about planting techniques and will plant a vegetable garden on school property. The students will then nurture the growing plants by watering and adding compost. Finally students will harvest the crops and calculate the total cost of their garden versus the cost of purchasing an equal amount of produce at a nearby grocery store.

Update (September 15, 2017)

After a cold and very delayed end to winter, spring and gardening season finally arrived in mid June. With time rapidly disappearing before the end of the school year, students worked feverishly to get the ground cleared and topsoil in place for planting in just a couple of days. After this monumental task of spreading many bags of topsoil, the seeds for pea plants, beets and bulbs for onions were planted. Plus the tomato plants, now bursting from their pots, were placed in the garden.

With an equally extreme summer taking place, the sunny and hot weather made for great growing weather for the plants. The onions, well over a foot high, the pea plants overflowing with pea pods and the tomato plants bending from the strain of the growing tomatoes awaited our September return.

Thus far a full supermarket bag of peas has been harvested for the soup kitchen with the onions, tomatoes and beets soon to come.