The Slow Food USA Blog

Last Chance Gardening

Posted on Fri, August 07, 2009 by Jerusha Klemperer
1 Comments | Categories: Farms and Farming, Food Justice, Youth Food Movement,

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by youth programs intern Reece Trevor

Slow Food USA will profile a number of our 2008 Slow Food in Schools Micro-Grant recipients in the coming months. Look out for these profiles, along with best practice suggestions for Slow Food in Schools projects from our 2008 Micro-Grant recipients, which will be housed on the Youth Programs page this fall.

Diablo Community Day School isn’t a typical high school. Its students have been expelled from every other school in the district; many of them have been shuttled around the alternative education system for months. Diablo Day is their last chance.

Something else sets Diablo Day apart: its school garden. In mid-2008, volunteers from Slow Food Delta Diablo, supported by a Slow Food USA Micro-Grant and donations from local businesses, set up an 8-bed garden on Diablo Day’s grounds and planted a number of permanent fruit trees. Every Tuesday for the rest of the school year, the “garden ladies” would join students in the garden as they learned about new foods and new ways of eating.

Within weeks of the garden’s opening, teachers at Diablo Day started to notice its successes. From the slow food perspective, the benefits of growing closer to their food was obvious, but the kids got much more. Teachers were amazed at how well gardening promoted teamwork and communications skills. Most of all, Diablo Day’s students go home knowing that they’ve created something that they can nurture as it grows—from a seed into an edible plant. As one student put it, “In the garden, I feel a sort of peace. I feel so proud of myself because I know that some of the wonderful things that I planted are still growing.”

Member Comments

From Lesley Stiles on Fri, September 04, 2009

Thanks for the kind words about our garden at Diablo Day. I wanted to just mention that we got a substansial grant from Kaiser Permanente to start and maintain the garden as well as a continueing ed grant this year. I always like to see thier name when we are talked about because they are so amazingly supportive with not only Diablo Day’s garden but our other garden projects in the district, especially our program at College Park High School that focauses on the Special Ed community. We hope to get that garden Slow Food Status as well because it is a garden that we have a composting program in, recycling in, cooking demo’s at lunch for the 2300 student poipulation with stuff like beets and beet greens that the students actually try and love! Best of all are our garden angel stewards from our special day classes that run the whole show.

We were at Diablo Day today for the first garden day of the new school year and worked with new as well as continueing students who picked Stars and Moon melons and compared the flavors, colors and textures to our “regular” watermelons. We also roasted butternut squas and sauteed zucchini with several herbs, all grown and picked as well as tried and liked or not by our amazing students.

Thanks again for your kind words and recognition,

Lesley and Stephanie, 2 of the garden ladies at Diablo Day