Belmont Day School Garden

The school garden serves three goals for our school community. First, it is a good source for our lunch program. The kitchen staff serves healthy foods, often locally sourced and from our own garden. Another goal is to use the garden as an outdoor classroom, a way to connect to curriculum across many age groups and disciplines, a place to guide students in community service, environmental stewardship, and food justice issues. A third goal is to grow vegetables to use for our school outreach efforts. The garden is a natural space where we learn to nurture and work communally, a wildlife habitat that supports pollinators, including two school beehives, a space to make connections with the larger community. We donate all our summer crops to two Boston food pantries, over 400 pounds last season. We provide children with direct connections to nature so they develop a deeper understanding of, and concern for the environment and larger world around them. We hope our students will grow up to help solve problems of sustainability and food equity, imagine new possibilities, invent new solutions, and educate future generations on how to live mindfully on this earth.