Digging in, Part II: The New School Garden
In Part I of Digging In , I wrote about the early history of school gardens and student gardeners in Seattle. In Part II, I'll look at the new wave of school gardens and explore a few around town. The Orca Garden at Columbia School, undated. Courtesy Rainier Valley Historical Society. The Edible Schoolyard In 1995 Alice Waters, chef and educator, launched an innovative project in partnership with a Berkeley elementary school: the Edible Schoolyard. The project was well publicized and caught on: schools around the country started garden clubs and small garden patches. A new generation of families, steeped in the liberal ideals of the sixties and the seventies, explored alternative teaching methods outside the standardized academic curriculum. The school garden as a tool for nature study and food culture was revived. Annalisa LaFayette remembers getting her first taste of gardening at a garden club at the old Denny Middle School in West Seattle in the miid-nineties: "It was on...