BCOPE

Our garden's goal is to provide all of the annual produce needs for our school as well as some surplus to be distributed by the nonprofit Healthy Waldo County (associated with Waldo County Hospital). We also aim to give our students the skills necessary to apprentice at local farms and/or create and maintain gardens for their own families now and in the future. We have a greenhouse, built by our students under supervision of our faculty, and we have some tools. Our garden has thus far focused on vegetables and herbs. This grant would enable us to build storage for our garden tools, expand our vegetable cultivation, begin learning to cultivate grains and low bush fruit, potentially start and maintain a beehive, and offer further formal agriculture training in the classroom. It also can help us provide education and soil testing for contaminants; we have tested our soil for nutrients but have not yet tested for contaminants.