An Edible Schoolyard Grows in Brooklyn

Yesterday Historic P.S. 39 The Henry Bristow Landmark School in Park Slope, Brooklyn launched an innovative Edible Community Garden (ECG) pilot program. The program plans to integrate the garden into the school’s curriculum, food program, and the surrounding community and is based in an edible micro-garden, showcasing modern planting methods appropriate for urban challenges. 

The growing obesity epidemic across the US has highlighted the critical link between children’s health and nutrition, and improving school food has been recognized as one important area where cities can tackle the problem at a local level.  School gardens have been recognized as engaging, hands on solutions to this issue. With the stated goal of engaging students in all aspects of farm to fork activities from inception to harvest, the project hopes to foster curiosity and a desire to understanding where food comes from in the students and community, as well as encouraging healthy lifestyle choices, and teach them in a hands-on way what it means to be environmental stewards.  

Currently, outside of several well-publicized and intensively funded school garden initiatives, few examples exist in the US that can quickly and affordably enable communities to tackle nutritional and food justice issues right now.  The pilot project hopes to team P.S. 39 staff with parents and community members in order to build a showcase school garden that aims to become a template and inclusive model of urban micro-farming for schools, homes, and businesses across the country, all within a 6 month time period.

P.S. 39 ECG intends to implement a garden-based learning curriculum where scientific principles come to life. The edible garden will be used to engage students with hands-on learning experiences from ‘seed to plate’ throughout the growing seasons.  The elementary classes will study, plant, maintain, harvest and enjoy the edible plants through curriculum-tied activities, learning about scientific principals through hands on experience. 

The pilot program will be based in pioneering sub-irrigated micro-garden planter technology, ideal for urban environments. Sub-irrigated planter systems (SIPs), store water and oxygen below the potting mix and roots, conserving water and nutrients, and are therefore more accessible and environmentally friendly alternative to conventional gardens.   The beneficial closed loop system dramatically increases yields, and aboveground planter system is ideal for urban lots without open soil areas or with possibly contaminated soil.   Through the use of readily available recycled containers such as shipping pallets and soda bottles, SIP design makes ‘plots’ portable and easy to maintain, as well as, providing an economically efficient solutions for communities with limited resources

The Edible Community Garden Pilot Program represents an integral component of a larger district-wide movement to become a pilot district for wellness in the schools.  Other local schools are also growing food in school gardens, implementing salad bars and healthier menus in their cafeterias, reducing styrofoam and waste, integrating food choices into the curriculum, and helping families learn to cook healthier meals.

Hopefully this innovative project will prove inspirational to other schools in the New York area and beyond, but also show that these projects can be successful even with limited time, funding and experience, so that all communities see that enjoying the fruits of their labors is within their reach.