Kinnikinnick students saw their food scraps come full circle last month when they harvested their first crop of veggies from planters filled with composted soil from Salish Soils.
The local composter has been collecting food scraps from Kinnikinnick Elementary School for almost two years now, turning it into soil at their facility in Sechelt. This year the company built five planting beds for the students with retractable greenhouse covers to demonstrate how the students' waste can be used to create new growth.
"We wanted to educate our young people to know what a closed loop system is," said Salish Soils owner Aaron Joe. "So the next step for us at Salish Soils was to build them a garden so now they can really see the fruits of their labour. They're seeing all their food waste come back as soil and they're replanting it with more food."
Teachers embraced the idea and made a schedule for each of their classes to take turns tending to the garden, which was planted in early April.
"They planted spinach, peas, potatoes, radishes, lettuce, anything that we could harvest before the end of June," said teacher Chris Allen, adding once the students leave at the end of June the garden will sit dormant until school starts again in September.
At the May 30 school sports day the students rotated through a salad making station, taking turns harvesting, cleaning and chopping vegetables from their garden.
In the end the students had enough salad to feed nearly 240 people without depleting the garden of its reserves.
The school will use the remaining vegetables for their breakfast program.
Allen said students were visibly enthusiastic while harvesting the garden and pointed out that the boys seemed especially keen.
Joe was pleased to see everyone's enthusiasm.
"It's such a great experience for us and we know it's a really good experience for them too. We just want to keep that momentum going with all the schools," Joe said.
He plans to speak with the school district about making the program available in all schools in the future.
