Seneca High

Our goals last year were to build and maintain a garden that would provide opportunities for my students to be active participants in a hands-on, across-the-curriculum project which embraced science, health, nutrition, home economics, agriculture and independent living skills to name a few. Also, included in our goals was the plan to use the garden as an avenue for demonstrating good citizenship and service to others by providing food for local soup kitchens. Because our garden project continues to be a work-in-progress, these goals will continue to be our main focus this year, but with more specific ideas included as we have become more knowledgeable and more competent in growing our garden. Specifically, within these existing goals, we have a goal and a plan to increase our growing seasons by adding a greenhouse. Using the grant funding, we plan to purchase a sizeable greenhouse which would provide us with the means to become more self-sustaining, to plant from seed, to produce plants to sell to encourage others to plant their own gardens and which would allow us to become more financially independent as well. Planting year-round provides our students the opportunity to experience a full growing season cycle as we realized with school out for the summertime, our students as a whole missed the opportunity to see our garden plants through their complete growth cycle. Also, although community volunteers and a few students and their parents helped to maintain the garden during the summer and helped to deliver produce weekly to the soup kitchen, we learned we could provide so much more food and provide it year round if we planted all year around. Delivering the produce to the soup kitchen and seeing the large community of people from young toddlers to teens to elderly who were lined up for over an hour ahead of time to receive one meal a day was the inspiration to all of us to see what else we could do. Seeing one of our own Seneca High students standing in line to receive her warm meal for the day on one of our delivery trips hit home to all of us. We knew then we had and we have the best opportunity to "do more". Therefore, we are committed to feed the hungry in our community healthy, fresh delicious vitamin enriched foods year round, week to week as our garden produces.