Los Angeles Leadership Academy

In addition to being an outdoor teaching space, a primary garden goal is to be able to grow enough vegetables to have a weekly salad bar at our school. Students at our school largely come from disadvantaged and low income families and many lack access to fresh healthy food. Yet in the work we have done so far in the garden we have found that our students love to chop vegetables, to make salads and stir fries and are very willing to eat their veggies. They aren't quite ready to give up on the chips and soda just yet, but we are very encouraged by the enthusiasm for preparing and eating vegetables.

My class made two huge salads for back to school night this year and the students ate all of one of the salads! It meant less salad for the parents, but it was pretty great to see the kids scraping the big bowl of veggies clean. We hope to continue with this and work on improving our soil fertility, adding compost, and eventually be able to produce enough for a school salad bar.

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