11 reasons to invest in a school garden

Here are 11 reasons to invest in a school garden.

  • The new curriculum emphasizes in-depth learning, sustainability, and interdisciplinarity.
  • Everyone in the school garden can take part in meaningful activities. Growing produces both visible and edible results that need no explanation.
  • A school garden is an excellent arena for working together towards a common goal, both with small tasks and long-term projects.
  • It's a way to be physically active for those who aren't that into sports.
  • Children are more open to tasting food they have a relationship with, and eating vegetables straight from the field is a low-threshold taste challenge. Children also often prefer raw, freshly harvested vegetables.
  • You will get up close to processes in nature: decomposition, water and nutrient cycles, photosynthesis, pollination, reproduction, weather and seasons, to name a few.
  • You will get up close to biodiversity and have many chances to get to know the little insects that contribute to the food we eat and the ecosystems we are a part of.
  • You will learn about the origins of food, which is necessary to understand food production and some of the challenges we face in a world where there are increasingly more people sharing smaller and smaller areas of arable land.
  • Cultivation activities are a good way to practice alertness to small changes and the ability to follow up on projects over time.
  • Biology is a rapidly developing field of research. In the school garden, you will learn the fundamentals of biology.
  • If you are organizing a fall market, there is hardly a better example of sustainable consumption than products made from unprocessed raw materials grown with manual labor.