Dieppe students get gardening

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/04/2019 (2582 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Walk into Catherine Emanuel’s classroom and the first thing you’ll notice is a shelf overflowing with greens. 

Her Grade 2/3 class at École Dieppe has been growing vegetables and herbs from seed since January through the Little Green Thumbs program — a national initiative that provides indoor garden kits and curricula to schools. 

“They’re hands-on and really excited by it,” Emanuel said of her students. 

The class is growing everything from kale to peppers to parsley under a grow light system. Later in the year, they’ll transplant some of what they’ve grown into the school’s gardens and learn how to protect their plants from local wildlife, like deer and rabbits. 

One section of the Little Green Thumbs program focuses on food production and requires the students to eat some of the vegetables from their garden. 

“A lot of students who would normally be pretty picky eaters at home, they know they have to try,” Emanuel said. “The kids are being very adventurous and one thing they’re getting from this is a sense of ownership.”

When The Metro visited on April 11, the class was preparing for its lunchtime ‘salad-bration,’ during which students learned how to make a vinaigrette and tried some of the greens in a salad. 

“I want to try eating the plant that I planted,” said Grade 3 student Ela Williams, referring to the red Swiss chard in the garden — a leafy green she hadn’t tried before. 

Williams described how she and her classmates prepared their seeds with their kindergarten reading buddies back in January. 

“We put soil pucks in water for about 30 minutes and then we took it out and put the seeds in and let them grow, they’ve grown so much,” she said. 

Little Green Thumbs also provides vermicomposting kits, which uses worms to break down food scraps. The class received 200 worms with their kit in September and a recent count has the worm population at close to 3,000. 

While Williams isn’t a fan of the wriggly classroom pets, her classmate Elliot Turcotte has some experience handling worms from working in his vegetable garden at home. 

“I love holding worms because when I’m at home and digging in the holes for the plants we find worms and I pick them up and put them where there’s already plants,” he said. 

Word of the indoor garden project has spread around the school and Emanuel hopes to get other classrooms involved in planting and making vermicompost. 

The project has also caught the attention of Staples Canada’s 2019 Superpower Your School contest. École Dieppe is one of 100 finalist schools selected by Earth Day Canada for their environmental stewardship. 

If selected, the school will win $20,000 worth of new technology products.