Food Production in School Gardens

Typically, school gardens are used as teaching gardens – the amount of food grown is just enough for lots of kids to explore new tastes, but not really enough to make a meal out of for so many students. With school closed during the spring, our team invested time they would ordinarily have spent teaching kids about growing food, coordinating volunteers and digging in the gardens themselves. As our focus shifted from learning gardens to production gardens, produce grown in school gardens was harvested and boxed up to distribute to hungry families in coordination with the Bellingham Public Schools’ food distribution program. Our team rotated distribution of garden fresh produce among schools and affordable housing sites with the highest need.

If you missed it this spring, a blog post by last school year’s AmeriCorps Food Educator Caroline Boschetto describes the joy that growing and distributing food brought to the community and AmeriCorps members.