The Fiddleheads Forest School, recently featured in a New York Times article, is a nature pre-school that focuses on giving children the opportunity to learn and grow through outdoor exploration. The program is located at the Washington Park Arboretum, which is co-managed by UW and the Seattle Department of Parks. Part of the space used by the forest school includes a raised bed garden that is planted with annual vegetables.

As part of my senior capstone at UW in which I am working to increase garden-based educational access for a range of ages, I am preparing the garden for spring planting. I wanted to gain experience as an educator, so in collaboration with the teachers at the pre-school and Amy Hughes, my mentor and education coordinator, I taught four garden based education sessions. The main concept I tried to convey was “What do plants need to grow” and had them act out being the sun, water and soil and the plant life cycle. We did a tasting tour through the garden, talked about our favorite vegetables, and most importantly had them all get their hands in the soil and plant garlic cloves. I told them that when they came to the garden in the spring they could harvest the garlic that they planted from ‘seed’. Note: In their enthusiasm, the garlic cloves were planted upside down, sideways, merely placed on top of the soil, or crushed so I will be replanting them… but they don’t need to know that. Getting them to be perfect gardeners was not the point, it was simply to give them the experience of having fun exploring the feel, taste, and smell of different vegetables and giving them the opportunity to get their hand dirty planting.

Exposing children to nature and growing food at a young age is extremely valuable and important step towards creating a more just food system for the future.