Garden Classrooms

Grow Your Own!

Grow Your Own! (GYO!) is The Ecology Center's community-building initiative dedicated to cultivating a sustainable food ecosystem and community. GYO! supports a growing network of over two dozen school gardens and their leaders with mentorship, trainings, curriculum, design support and resources to help create sustainable gardens and programing that are beautiful, educational, and functional, integrating essential elements of holistic ecological design. 

pleasantville edible school gardens

Pleasantville gardens serve the elementary, middle and high school. Students grow, harvest and eat the crops. Healthy eating and good nutrition is taught. 

Horicon Mindful Edible Schoolyard

Matrix of Change, a local non-profit sustainability group founded by Mary-Dee Bowers in the 1990s, has provided Horicon School with both a mindfulness program, (Goldie Hawn's MindUp Program) and a working garden with fencing, tools, garden boxes, and now a new portable green house so that each classroom has its own garden area. Horicon's dedicated administration, faculty, and staff, and a group of local volunteers help the children build and reestablish their own gardening systems each year.

Growing Oshkosh's School Garden Program

Growing Oshkosh's mission is to raise awareness and educate citizens about the numerous benefits of fresh, healthy, local and fair food (and food production) . We are working with the schools in the Winnebago County to bring edible gardens to all schools, beginning with the K-5 schools. GO helps design and build the initial raised garden beds, one for each grade K-5 for a total of six beds. At schools where the elementary and middle exist in the same building, the number of beds can be extended to incorporate the middle school grades levels.

Bridges Charter School

We are a K-8 single-site charter school located in Thousand Oaks, California. Our charter is based on Whole Child education with an emphasis on healthy eating and sustainability. We have dedicated garden specialists and every classroom gets their own garden bed which they work on with the specialist.

Gallatin Valley Farm to School

Gallatin Valley Farm to School serves to connect schools with local producers in the Gallatin Valley of Southwest Montana. We teach classroom and garden lessons to students in grades K-8 in order to educate them about healthy food and where it comes from, and provide resources to teachers to carry out this programming on their own. We also work with school district food service to provide resources to purchase products from producers in the Gallatin Valley.

Jefferson Elementary

Norwalk Grows is a school garden program in Norwalk CT, installing edible gardens and providing garden education programs in Norwalk Public Schools.

O'Maley Innovation Middle School

6th grade students plant, grow, and harvest popcorn and learn about soil, garden ecosystems, and sustainable agriculture in partnership with the 6th grade science program.

Gloucester Preschool

Students have two complete seed-to-fork experiences every year: Fall Harvest Day and spring Salad Days. 

Shamrock Gardens

Shamrock Gardens' gardening program was started in the 2000's by parents in the community around the school. The program seeks to engage students in hands-on, outdoor learning, bridging curriculum taught in the classroom with lessons in the gardens. Students also receive lessons inside cooking up veggies raised outside, learning about the nutritional benefits of having a diet rich in fruits and vegetables.

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