The Children’s Garden and World Farm a place to spend time planting, playing, observing, cultivating awe and curiosity, and building community in a nurturing environment. It is a place to follow the wonder, make and learn from mistakes, and to find a sense of safety and belonging in nature. Year-round programming in the gardens and farm is designed to be an immersive experience, supporting young gardeners with the tools they need to explore the garden as a resource through nature-based and open-ended learning, planting and harvesting, explorations in local and cultural foodways, eco-artmaking, and natural science investigations., and play.
Programs that take place in the Children’s Garden and World Farm include: Garden Buds, After-school Adventures, Children’s Garden, and paid internships.
The Children’s Garden & World Farm
The Children’s Garden is the collection of several seasonal programs with the goal to nourish community, creativity, curiosity, and social and environmental awareness for young people ages 5 - 12, high-school and college-aged youth, and toddlers and their caregivers. Young gardeners develop skills in planting, tending to, and harvesting vegetables, herbs, and flowers in an outdoor learning environment. Youth also learn skills in composting, supporting wildlife through organic and regenerative gardening practices, and tools creating change as it relates to environmental and food justice. Moreover, young gardeners cultivate creativity, develop social-emotional skills, grow their civic engagement all in service of supporting their their growth as individuals and members of a community by looking to what gardening and nature can teach them about how to shape positives change for themselves and their environments.
Flavors of Home
In Flavors of Home, young gardeners explored the connections between plants and people as they learned the many ways that people use plants to create a sense of home and belonging through cooking, medicine, and craft. Participants cultivated their own special relationships with plants that hold important meaning to homes across the world, while also capturing their own home’s unique flavor through gardening, hands-on experimentation, and crafting of herbal and botanical goods. Young gardeners invited their families to their own mock CSA. Young gardeners learned the history, origins, and model of CSA and community-centered markets to harvest foods and create their own goods packed in give-away harvest boxes for their families.
Guiding Questions:
Where does our food come from? Who are the people and more-than-human kin whose labor made it possible for us to eat this food?
What are the specific plants, foods, and flavors that help shape our understanding of home?
How can we share and celebrate the plants and foods that are special to us in community?
Why is it important to tell our food stories?
Which / whose stories are preserved? Which / whose stories are forgotten? Why? Which of these stories will we amplify?
What are the creative ways we can preserve both foods and the stories they tell?
What food stories do we want to collect, preserve, share?
How much is enough? Who can I share my harvest with?
Gardens for Wildlife
We invited all young animal lovers and wildlife advocates to spread their love for wildlife across the Children’s Garden. Young gardeners created wildlife habitats, learned about the more-than-human kin we each share space with, and created art to advocate for the care of their most beloved garden friends. We looked to the dirt to find earthworms, the flowers to find butterflies, the skies to find birds, and everywhere in between. Through investigation of reciprocal and resilient living ecosystems, young gardeners cultivated and built practices in care, empathy, and stewardship. Young gardeners learned to tend the garden in ways to supports local wildlife’s access to food, water, shelter, and spaces to raise young to get certified by the National Wildlife Federation as a Certified Wildlife Habitat®.
Guiding Questions:
How can the gardens we tend to be spaces for me and wildlife?
Who is invited and welcomed into this garden? Why?
What are the creative ways we build safe spaces for the wildlife we love?
What kinds of habitats and places in nature do I want to protect, love, and care for? Why?
In what ways can I contribute to a safe, brave, inclusive environment?
How do we measure the impact of our care for wildlife?
How can we hold ourselves / communities accountable in supporting the wellbeing of wildlife?
Art in the Garden
Budding artists explored the connections between art and science, and were given the space to ignite their wild imaginations and getting to themselves as artists in the garden. Through learning about various ecological artists and infusing creativity into gardening chores, young gardeners developed their own artistic practice through observation, self-expression, and an array of artmaking techniques that looked to the garden as inspiration, resource, and site for their artwork. Young artists explored printmaking with botanicals, dyeing and painting with plant parts, and sculpture with up-cycled and recycled material.
Guiding Questions:
What does it mean to be creative in a garden already so full of life? How can we express this creativity in ways that is supportive of our garden?
How can the art I create honor the growth in this garden?
What are some examples of how ecology and art intersect and influence each other within a garden setting?
What seeds of creativity am I sowing?
How can we inspire a deeper appreciation for the natural world through the works of art we make?
What can plants teach us about creativity?
Garden Buds
Tailored to the youngest of gardeners, Garden Buds invited toddlers and their caregivers to connect whilst exploring the wonder of nature through hands-on work and play in the garden. Through open-ended sensory play and garden chores adapted for children between 2-4 to develop their fine-motor skills, garden buds harvested garden produce, created botanical crafts, and share stories and songs in all seasons of the garden.
Guiding Questions:
Where do my little garden bud and I feel awe in the garden? Joy? Curiosity? Belonging?
How can I support my garden bud to risk, play, imagine, and move with safety in the garden?
What is my garden bud paying attention to? What am I? How do we nurture this?
What are the ways my garden bud can teach me in the garden?
What is the garden teaching me and my garden bud in how we move our bodies? How we manage our emotions?
What is a seed? What is soil? What is a flower? Where does my food come from? What do plants need to grow?
What are ways I can support a lasting and meaningful relationship to nature for me and my and my garden bud through a connection to the garden?
The Children’s Garden & World Farm
Children’s Garden is committed to nourishing community, creativity, curiosity, and social and environmental awareness for young people ages 5 - 12. Young gardeners develop skills in planting, tending to, and harvesting vegetables, herbs, and flowers in an outdoor learning environment. Youth also learn skills in composting, supporting wildlife through organic and regenerative gardening practices, and creating change as it relates to environmental and food justice. Moreover, young gardeners cultivate social-emotional skills to support their growth as individuals and members of a community by looking to what gardening and nature can teach them about how to shape positives change for themselves and their environments.
Program Goals:
Through culturally responsive and anti-racist curriculum and practice, support young people in getting curious about their relationship to nature and wildlife through reflecting on their preferences, fears, and biases in nature.
Support young people in cultivating stewardship skills and to begin naming with young people how they will use and build these skills to support the flourishing of regenerative, sustainable, and accessible nature spaces.
Guide young people in developing gardening, cooking, and storytelling skills to honor and celebrate the plants and wildlife in their lives, while also learning ways to support their wellbeing.
Nurture a space in which young people can openly explore the history of land use and imagine new ways of being with the land.
Support young gardeners in learning how tending to the garden can offer social-emotional learning that helps them to prioritize relationships rooted in reciprocity and interdependence, show up with persistence and patience, and reach for mindfulness practices that help them to grow as caring individuals in the communities they are a part of.
Experiment with new creative processes / gardening / tools / skills.
Activities Include:
Foraging for and making Botanical Dye for eco-printed tablescapes
Seeding, transplanting, mulching, watering, harvesting, weeding, turning the compost, and various garden chores
Wildcrafting weeds and flowers to create handmade soaps
harvesting red clover, grinding, and creating a red clover flour
council of woodland beings circle
plant identification and garden signage
soil testing and water filtration science experiments
bird-watching
sit spots and nature journaling
storytelling, song, and stretching circles
free nature play
much more! curriculum coming soon!