Community Garden Project

Sir Winston Churchill is a grades 7 – 12 school located in beautiful Thunder Bay, Ontario. We have a separate area for the grades 7 & 8 Hub, where there are over 168 students. The three grade 8 language classes are studying environmental sustainability through relationships within the community and the land. We have begun a community garden project. We have begun our project by studying climate, plant hardiness zones, food sustainability, and helping the community. This project will include support and partnerships from other community members and organizations. All grade 8 students have been volunteering at our local Shelter House, which has been an experience to teach them the importance of community, care, health, and leadership. Students are responsible for all planning, planting, and maintenance of this project, however, many community members are volunteering their time to teach the students about the land and gardening.
For the first year, the planning of the three beds will be pre-determined using the “Square Foot Gardening” approach. Each bed will be adopted by a class. Other interested classes will be involved in vermi-culture, composting, sign making and other initiatives.
We have the great opportunity of having a native elder who will be teaching us about the importance of the land and active participation within a culture. During the second year of our project, we plan to make a Native Spiritual Garden consisting of all four sacred plants. This project has been widely anticipated and is strengthening our community. We are very excited to plant our seedlings!

Mise à jour (27 juin 2012)

We are currently in year 2 of our community garden. We have reached out to many community partners who have supported our efforts and contributed to our garden. This year be bought a new wheelbarrow, supplies for gardening, soil, plexi-glass for our greenhouse and new plants.
We partnered up with the environmental science program in our school who was creating a new composting system and irrigation system for the greenhouse. With consolidated efforts, we finished the greenhouse and fund-raised enough to have the students build a garden shed for all our supplies. Our composters and vermi-composters are under way, and we have created different themed gardens. We have our growing tables, within the classrooms and greenhouse, and we have our vegetable gardens, which we primarily focused on traditional crops, and we had our seeds blessed by an Aboriginal Elder in our community.
This year we also added raspberries to our berry gardens. Our future goals are to grow enough berries so that students can learn how to make jams, pies and preservatives. This relates to our Literacy Unit on Food Sustainability.