Our society has lost its link to agriculture and an agrarian society. People don't have the knowledge or desire to grow their own food, which has led us to consume a great amount of processed foods. Our children have no idea where their food comes from. Also, people need to be more connected to their environment and local wildlife and plants.
We have built a greenhouse with our shop class and this is our first year using the greenhouse. We have zero funding and have to find the funding for ourselves as we are not associated with any CTE organization. This year we have tried growing annual flowers as last year they tried vegetables and they wanted to see the difference. This project is student led and I am their facilitator, even though I am their teacher. This is the practical component of their environmental science and climate change units and it has been good for them to put things into practice. We will be adding additional space to our greenhouse area and are wishing to grow more plants from Fall to Spring next year, with the aim to be on vegetables and edible plants that we will give away to those in our community. Our community is all very low income and quite isolated (25 miles from a local grocery store that has fresh produce). Our aim is to teach people how to grow their own fresh produce in either container gardening or small garden plots. We aim to do this by teaching their children/grandchildren how to do it and have them teach those in the community. We will also hold open community events for people to attend and witness our program.
