Last week with the Children’s Garden and Exploring Toronto Programs was all about seeds as we spouted in jars and egg carton cups, scavenged for seeds in the garden and shook our seed shakers.  Ruth Heller’s book The Reason for a Flower was certainly a helpful tool with the colorful illustrations to guide us through the process.

]]> http://horticulturaltherapystudent.edublogs.org/2009/08/23/hatching-seeds/feed/ 0 http://horticulturaltherapystudent.edublogs.org/2009/08/19/growing-beyong-the-strike/ http://horticulturaltherapystudent.edublogs.org/2009/08/19/growing-beyong-the-strike/#comments Wed, 19 Aug 2009 22:32:41 +0000 hortstudent http://horticulturaltherapystudent.edublogs.org/?p=265 Since returning to work I have been loading up my bicycle with supplies and heading to different City of Toronto community centers to deliver garden/nature activities to camp children.  Together we’ve been mixing seedballs and compost tea, sprouting snacks, learning about red wigglers, transforming into butterflies, playing fancy flower bingo and carefully observing pollinators at work.  I’ve especially enjoyed sharing story time with The Story of Frog Belly Rat Bone (Timothy Basil Ering) and a new addition to my collection, Wangari’s Trees of Peace:  A True Story from Africa (Jeanette Winter).

At one of our sites, I was pointing out to the children that the eggplants had not gone beyond flowering despite us being well into August.  I pondered aloud why this should be and heard one little girl responded that it was because of the BIG strike.  Well actually, Mother Nature definitely hasn’t been on strike while we left our gardens unattended.  It was rather humbling to return to our sites and find jungles.  The rain certainly helped keep many things alive, despite the lack of sun and heat for the eggplants and tomatoes alike.  There are certainly a lot of weeds but in some cases this has helped to safely hide our growing treasures.

***

This past Sunday we went ahead and celebrated summer at the High Park Children’s Garden with the Tastes of the World Garden Fiesta.  Visitors to the garden had an opportunity to try flavorful vegetarian dishes, representing different parts of the globe, prepared by our Youth Cooking Program, using predominately local ingredients picked from the garden and purchased at the Dufferin Grove Farmers’ Market.  My two favorites were the Ethiopian lentil salad with beautiful beets and sticky coconut rice served with peaches (a local twist to this recipe from Laos).

This special event included musical performers and garden activities, including  the chance for children to play with their food by creating edible snack sculptures.  It was delightful to watch their imaginations at work as they created exotic creatures from local produce, each one a work of art.

The Bosnian gardeners invite the community to Children’s Day at their New Horizons garden.

This Saturday July 25th from 4-6 p.m.

See flyer for full details.

Come see what happened to the Three Sisters Garden planted in the spring…

Robin C. Moore

Before and After Asphalt:  Diversity as an Ecological Measure of Quality in Children’s Outdoor Environments.

Somehow this spring seemed to pass like a flash, perhaps due to the flurry of my activity, from moving to High Park to starting a brand new job with the City of Toronto, Parks Forestry & Recreation.  In the role of Expansion Assistant, with the Children’s Garden & Exploring Toronto Programs, I have the great fortune of being able to support City of Toronto sites integrating children’s gardening and environmental education into their programming.  The Program’s flagship location is the High Park Children’s Garden, a site I previously volunteered at in 2007.  The site is exemplary with wheel chair accessibility and raised beds.  In my role, I am seeking ways to include horticultural therapy practices into program delivery, in order to ensure that gardening can be fully enjoyed by all young people.

As part of this Program’s capacity building mandate, we offer City Staff Training and started the season with an interactive workshop, delivered by Jane Hayes, that provided many creative ideas for children’s garden programming.

A significant task, early on the job, was to pick the plant orders (vegetables and flowers) for a number of Expansion Sites across the City and to make deliveries.  I was thrilled to find myself once again in a greenhouse setting, especially considering the energy and activity of the large scale operation at the High Park Greenhouses.

Last spring/summer I spent considerable time working at the Providence Farm Greenhouse and was now pleasantly surprised to discover how transferable the skills I had gained were in my new place of employment.  My Horticultural Therapy Internship at Providence Farm was intended to develop my skills in working with people, yet it has become evident that I gained a considerable amount of horticulture knowledge simultaneously, including plant identification, watering, pest control, seeding, transplanting and picking.

Unfortunately, I am part of the on-going workers’ strike and haven’t been able to tend to the gardens and enthusiastic new gardeners.  I hope it will be resolved quickly…

We celebrated Earth Day at the GET HONEST:  Our Youth Matter event in York Region, which brought together decision makers, front line workers, educators, community groups, funders and youth, to explore local collaborations around youth initiatives.

The event was hosted by the York Region Alliance to End Homelessness in partnerhsip with Street Kids International, as part of the Streetjibe program.

We had an exciting kick-off to spring at the H.O.P.E. Community Garden in Parkdale with outdoor nature activities for kids during March Break.  Children and parents biked, walked, took the TTC and in one case, drove all the way from Scarborough to join us on the blue tarp at Masaryk Park.  We had beautiful spring weather, minus the rain.  We stretched like seeds, matched animals with their marks, smelt, tasted and planted basil, built a magic forest and garden guardians, explored objects from nature blindfolded, filled musical bean shakers and created food art snacks.  At the start, everyone wondered if there was really anything alive in the garden, but after investigating with magnifying glasses, signs of spring were discovered peeking through the soil.

Thank you to Greenest City for hosting and Garden Jane for supporting our learning in organizing and facilitating this programming.  Special appreciation of Leah and Marilyn for working with the children in the garden.

Program Information:

Will your kids go a little CRAZY over March Break?
Need something to do with them?

Join us for activities at the H.O.P.E. Community Garden
Wednesday March 18th & Friday March 20th
2 pm – 4 pm

Kids will make art, listen to stories and plant seeds.
Parents, we need you or a guardian there. But you get to RELAX,
make new friends and join activities if you want.

Dress for the outdoors. Rain or shine. We’ll have yummy snacks.

Who: Children, ages 3-9 and a parent or guardian
Where: Masaryk Park, 220 Cowan Ave. (meet in the garden)
Cost: $5 per child (includes snack for all)

Pre-Registration Required
Call 647.438.0038 (Weekdays 9-6) or Email register@greenestcity.ca

Greenest City

Garden Jane

My sense is that there is a strong foundation of work related to connecting children with nature and the outdoors but that this work remains more tentative with older children and youth, despite well established exemplary sites.  This Evergreen event coincided with the Government of Ontario launch of the Roots of Youth Violence report.  The report draws critical attention to systemic issues of racism, inequality and poverty.  A lot of recent media time has been focused on the recommendation supporting the collecting of race-based statistics.  Coming from the forum on outdoor spaces,  I was looking to see if community design is considered.  Right in the Executive Summary, under Understanding the Roots, comes this strong statement:

“Regrettably, right across Ontario, there are many examples of poor planning and poor design of the built and the developed natural environment, creating places that make some youth feel powerless and isolated, leading them to believe that their options are as limited as their horizons. These negative factors include physical and psychological isolation from the broader community; bleak landscapes with no inviting places to gather or play and little usable green space; a lack of adequate and accessible social and physical infrastructure; limited or non-existent transportation services; and unsafe streets, common areas and passageways (9).”  [Emphasis my own]

The link between urban design and physical inactivity and obesity is also established by the report (13).  Surprisingly, when you come to the recommendations there is nothing specific about the potential design of outdoor spaces for youth to gather, play and create.  It’s as if we can identify the problem but still lack mainstream thinking about the potential to re-design space.  There is more comfort in establishing new programs versus changing the environment in which these programs are offered.  Metaphorically the report discusses grounds:  “We must convert the grounds that now nurture the immediate risk factors into new grounds that produce hope and opportunity” (18).  We need to be talking about physical grounds as part of this discussion.  What do we know about the possible resiliency inducing effects of the physical environment?

The report includes a number of  recommendations where I believe environmental education could be used as an effective response to addressing violence in our society.  Opportunities to implement include, making the school curriculum more relevant, encouraging healthy activities and developing schools as community hubs of activity (which should involve consideration of the use of outdoor spaces).

There is a rich dialogue before us about the opportunity to expand the reach of environmental education.  There is no question that issues of poverty and representation need to be further considered.  Where does this work happen?  Who gets to participate and benefit?  How do we effectively bring together social justice, environmental education and community development?

As of August, the Alberta Children’s Hospital has hired my fellow classmate, from the Home Farm Horticultural Therapy Certificate, Rebecca Feasby, as a horticultural therapist.  Rebecca is currently working with the Impatient Group Program, Nephrology Clinic and the Dr. Gordon Townsend School on site. The work is part of a larger Therapeutic Arts Program that includes Music Therapy, Art Therapy and Horticultural Therapy.

Last Friday, before the CHTA Annual Conference, I was toured around the hospital by Becky, with Gwenn Fried from the Glass Garden at the Rusk Institute in New York.  We had a lot of fun preparing Greek salad, with students from the school, using fresh herbs from the raised containers (above) and the creative juices were visibly flowing in the Nephrology Clinic as patients began designing a future outdoor garden space.  The Children’s Orchard, right on hospital property, provided a tasty afternoon treat.