Home page

Text size

E-mail this page

INUVIK
Thanks to a teacher's food-growing program, East Three is going organic.

East Three student Mary-Leigh Firth is one of a group working on an indoor garden at the school. - T. Shawn Giilck/NNSL photo

Food teacher Patrick Gauley-Gale has a group of students learning how to manage an indoor garden. Modest in size so far, the project is poised to leapfrog in extent in years to come.

"We had a project funded through Ecology North to start an indoor garden," Gauley-Gale said. "I wanted to get some edible plants growing for our classes to use and to help our Healthy Lunch Program.

"I feel like, particularly in the North, people are pretty disconnected from the food that they eat, so I wanted to give them experience in growing it themselves and being exposed to some of the different kinds of greens you wouldn't be able to find at the grocery store was worthwhile."

He said he wanted to teach students about what kinds of vegetables there are – both the knowledge and the vocabulary around the different types.

"I've had some kids who don't know what a cucumber looks like, much less the plant it comes from," he said.

That disconnection comes from the lack of a farming tradition in the North, Gauley-Gale said, and from the erosion of traditional gathering skills for country foods. Since so much food is trucked or flown in to town, it's difficult for his students to appreciate the variety of foods available, or to understand they can grow at least some of their own, he said.

Farming, while not impossible, is very challenging in the Northern climate of the NWT.

"The disconnect is at least with the greens, and the vegetables," he said. "I've heard there were a couple of farms outside of Aklavik 70 years or so ago."

It's not his first foray into teaching students to grow their own food. For two years, his students have grown a variety of vegetables at the Inuvik Community Greenhouse. The greenhouse produce amounts to about 150 pounds a year, Gauley-Gale said, out of three dozen crops.

"In the fall we're harvesting our own seeds and dehydrating tomatoes and stuff to use in the winter," he said. "We're growing easy stuff to start with, and we only started planting a month ago, so we've got some chives, cilantro, some basil, so mostly herbs, and a couple types of lettuce. We've got a couple dozen tomato plants and beets and that kind of stuff too. I wanted to get some of those started now and hope they'll hold on long enough for transplanting.

"There's been no casualties yet, except for a couple of plants we've nibbled on."

He said his students have enthusiastically stepped into their roles.

"It's amazing to see how some of them have really taken to caring for their plants and checking them every day. Some have the knack."

Gauley-Gale is planning for the produce to be used in East Three's Healthy Lunch program, which serves up to 50 lunches a day. There won't be much volume produced in this experimental stage but he has plans to expand it next year.

"It won't be huge. This is about a quarter of what we want. Next year, we're hoping each class will grow their own. It's been fantastic so far."

We welcome your opinions. Click here to e-mail a letter to the editor.