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Growing together

Nathalie Heiberg-Harrison
Northern News Services
Published Wednesday, June 1, 2011

SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - Nearly 70 students at Weledeh Catholic School got their hands, and in some cases feet, dirty when the on-site garden education program moved from the classroom to the schoolyard last week.

Led by a group of volunteers from the Yellowknife Community Garden Collective, the eager elementary students took their turn digging up a quarter of each garden plot last Wednesday and mixing it with manure, bone meal and blood meal.

Earlier in May, the students stayed indoors and learned the basics of gardening. Now for the next four weeks they will be planting and caring for vegetables outside, with the goal of having enough to harvest in the fall.

Although they had to forgo planting anything last week, students still had fun mixing their soil and coming up with team names like the Manure Do-ers, Garden Models and Green Lanterns.

Rankin Stewart, one of the students who took part, said he learned manure doesn't smell bad and added, "It's okay to get nice and dirty like I did."

The program, which aims to help students understand healthy living and eating, came from an idea by former principal Merril Dean, who wanted to educate more children about gardening.

"I remember my children being young and not really having an understanding of where vegetables were from and how they were grown," she said.

"If my kids didn't know that, there have to be a lot of kids who weren't exposed to it."

She contacted the community garden collective, who jumped on the idea, and eventually they secured funding from the City of Yellowknife, BHP Billiton, NWT Power Corporation and TD Bank Friends of the Environment Foundation.

Last June, when the ground thawed, volunteers built the garden plots, which replaced a part of the schoolyard that was only made up of barren rock and three-foot-high grass, and that kids seldom played on.

The result: something much more useful to students.

"There's that feeling of efficacy when you eat a meal with what you have produce with your hands," Dean said.

Shannon Ripley, an environmental scientist with Ecology North, who led the activities, said the students were inspiring, motivated and showed a lot of interest in learning about what is possible to grow in the North.

She said some of them suggested growing mangoes and other tropical plants, and that it would be fun to learn about what they have grown at their old homes abroad, and what they can grown here at their new home in Yellowknife.

She added that any student who wishes to continue with their work can get a "garden buddy" at one of the 19 plots at the Weledeh community garden, which about 40 Yellowknifers will be cultivating this summer.

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