New partner school! Eastdale CI

by Aiden Crosby & Sunday Harrison

November 27, 2024

"Always do your best. What you plant now, will be harvested later"

For the past month of November we have taken on Eastdale Collegiate Institute located at 701 Gerrard St E. It has a beautiful 16,000 square foot rooftop garden once partnered with FoodShare, but as they had to back out, we have taken on being stewards of the garden with the students! FoodShare left behind an amazing infrastructure, though, for which we are so grateful.

We surveyed the rooftop for the first week or so before taking on programs, looking at soil health, size of beds, layout of the garden, equipment and tools to get an idea of what we could offer well past this fall and already thinking of next season's potential. It's essentially an urban farm – lots of space to grow multiple crops and have high yield (hopefully). We then attended once a week in November and served 55 students.

Students exercising to get ready for garden work

This is our first secondary school so we learned that most of the students aren’t shy of hard work; many of them have had jobs and are already thinking about their future and what they can do after high school. We want to help influence that and start training them as young farmers/urban growers and show them that this is possible, and start to give them that experience they may need if they want to pursue a career in this!  Our first goal was soil remediation. We started the process of repairing the soil which ties into the programming with classes perfectly, a week or so passed and we had our first program! We really wanted to see what students liked about last year and what they wanted to see growing or something they loved that grew last year to get them thinking about next season already (as farmers should). 

Aiden (program leader) describing how to put the gardens to bed

Our very first program was introducing us and who we are, where we are and what our goal is with them as students, and our goal before winter. We showed them that spring prep actually begins in late fall/early winter to put nutrients back into the soil. Before anything else, we chopped and dropped all existing plants that were in the beds which took the whole day. Each student had clippers and we worked in groups to cut everything and lay it down! 

Aiden helping students make comfrey tea

Then the next week we brought some comfrey from Winchester PS and we told them what comfrey does and why that’s important for soil health and how we extract that, which is making a comfrey tea, cutting up the plant and putting it in big jugs to steep outside for 2 weeks and boom, comfrey tea is ready to spread on the soil. They are older students so when they start a task they finish it quick, then the fun/hard work started of mixing fresh soil in a big bin and having them work as a team to spread it out amongst each and every bed. They are very hands-on and really enjoy physical work so they finished fast! Last week we introduced fall garlic planting with them, taught them the growing period and how it works, and taught them how to properly plant it as well. So going forward our goal together with them is revitalizing the beds and winter sowing native flowers. Everything is to get their minds into thinking like growers, and we really look forward to next season with them!

Here’s a view from above of the rooftop garden:

Google Satellite view of the school rooftop

The area at the bottom of the picture is also amazing, with a covered outdoor area with picnic tables, and indoor classroom with six 3-tier lights units, cold frames, and all manner of tools and supplies. We think this school garden has lots of potential! We also met the chef, who cooks every day for the students and also teaches them to cook. In the past, food was brought down from the rooftop garden and turned into meals, plus students took food home.

All in all, an incredibly fulsome garden and culinary program to step into. We look forward to returning in the spring!