The school garden is very important here at Heritage Academy. It is a great way to have students learn in an experiential way. They get to use their hands and get involved in a project from start to finish. The applications are endless and the results astounding. Every time I speak with a different group I challenge them to find a class that you can’t use the garden for, and I haven’t been stumped yet. Garden journals in English, graphing output in math, soil samples in geography, root dissections in science, the list is never ending. We have students from grade 1-12 in the garden, and they love it. The cost is very low and the payoff is very high. We have students have a chance to solve problems, fine tune designs, eat foods they never would have if they hadn’t grown it, and much, much more. Our gardens are an invaluable tool, an outdoor laboratory.

Gardens do not need to start with massive investments, ours started off quite humbly. In my first grade 8 class seven years ago I had a student ask me how to grow pickles. This threw me for a loop as an educator. My answer was to put a shovel in the ground in the back yard and plant a 1$ pack of seeds. That year we had cucumbers, and we pickled them in class. Next September that student ate the pickles that we had “grown,” it was an amazing experience, and what drove me forward to keep the gardens going at Heritage Academy.

Now our garden has 8 organic vegetable beds, including a tire garden and an octagonal pyramid. We produce a great deal of food every year. The students plan, plant, manage and decorate the garden. In the summer we donate extra food to local restaurants and they, in turn give cooking lessons to students during the winter. We also launched the city wide program the Potato Project this year in conjunction with the Ottawa Food Bank in an effort to give back fresh food to the community. It is our goal to have a garden program that connects the students, teachers, parents and the community as a whole. We have been working with other local schools to get a strong network so that the gardens are all helping each other.

The next steps at Heritage Academy include, expanding the gardens, strengthening community ties, installing a greenhouse, working towards a student farmers program, and much more. We pride ourselves in implementing new, interesting pilot projects. We also hope to support new schools that would like to start gardens but are not sure how.

I invite you to take a look around, see if your school has a garden, and how you might be able to become involved, and if it doesn’t feel free to contact me and I can point you in the right direction. Let’s keep the Ottawa School Garden Revolution going!

I have seen students, over the course of time go from not being active at all to doing daily exercise and the difference is amazing.  The sense of purpose, discipline and self betterment, as well as the purely physical benefits cannot be ignored.

If only 7% of our young population are getting enough exercise, then this points to a systemic problem.  Do we as a society see regular exercise as something of value?  Are we passing on the fun of physical activity to our children and students?

We have to ensure that when we try to solve this problem we are noting, “giving a man a fish,” but rather, “teaching a man to fish.”  Students should not be mandated into exercise, but rather learn to incorporate and enjoy exercise and healthy eating as part of their day.

I have received a great deal of interest from people who would like to participate in the Potato Project to help the Ottawa Food Bank, however, I have run out of barrels and I am rapidly running out of seed.    This is a great chance to help the community, and it is also a fantastic hands on learning experience for young and old, seeing food from ground to plate, to people who need it the most.

There are two ways you can still help out the project, you can grow potatoes traditionally, or you can make your own barrel.

Grow Traditionally:

If you go to a seed store and get some certified seed potatoes you can grow them in type of traditional garden.  Seed potatoes will give you a healthier plant and a larger yield.  If you hill soil around the plants as they grow, then you will get a nice big yield.

Make your Own Barrel:

1. Go to Cohen and Cohen and buy an olive barrel for $15
2. Making two cuts with a saw separate the barrel into three equal parts
3. Take the middle part and attached 3 wooden supports ( hockey sticks work well) so that they stick out 2 inches on either end of the section
4. Check the video to see how the barrel should look  http://heritage-academy.com/potato-project/
5. Plant 4 certified seed potatoes in your barrel and follow the instructions on this web page

If you come by 207 Bayswater Ave. and ask for Derek I can hand out seed as long as it lasts, I still have a few pounds left!

No matter how you decide to grow your potatoes follow us on twitter, facebook, or on the Spud blog to see when we will harvest them, it will be in September.  Come by the school in the given window and you can add your potatoes to the haul that we will be donating to the food bank.

If you have any questions, please contact me at rhodenizer@heritage-academy.com

potato project how to manual_v2 (1)

As a school for students with dyslexia, ADD/ADHD and a variety of other learning disabilities, hands on learning is very important to us.  The idea of the Potato Project evolved all winter, as I thought about it and bounced ideas around back and forth with a variety of people.  It was Alyssa from Growing Up Organic that really pushed things in the final direction when she suggested reusing food grade olive barrels to make our potato towers work.

From there we ended up on Ottawa Morning with Robyn Bresnahan, her great interview and personal endorsement had us jump from 5 barrels accounted for to 50 in just one day.  Originally we had only planned to make 20 barrels, but due to the high volume of interest, we decided to increase the number of barrels to 60! We reached 60 but the interest kept coming.  I got emails daily, and my waiting list ended up somewhere near another 60!

At this point I thought it might be a good idea to let the Ottawa Food Bank know we were doing this project.  We got significant support from the staff over there, Jason Grey helped with design and build, and Peter Tilley gave some excellent support and advice in a variety of directions.

One of the most important factors fell into place when Homestead Organics came through with a massive 50lbs donation of potato seed!  With a great idea, all the materials we needed and a hard working team, we pushed forward.  I did presentations in our classes, and soon Heritage students were all on board.  The students helped moving the barrels around and helped build parts of the barrels..  They also researched how this would help hungry people in Ottawa, the nutrition value of potatoes, how potatoes grow and even did some potato art.

We have only just launched this project and I feel like it has been a major success.  It is great to see all the support we got from Ottawa.  We had our volunteers, plus others who have offered to grow potatoes on their own, all come out at the launch.  I gave out as much seed and instruction as I could.  I am still getting emails and interest, even as I write this emails are coming in.  We are going to do our best to support as many people as possible over the next little while to make this potato harvest a big one.

We encourage our volunteers to document and post their adventures as they grow potatoes for the food bank.  We will be posting comments on our spud blog, re-tweeting tweets on Twitter, and sharing all that we can on Facebook.

We encourage people to grow potatoes at home using any technique they like and add their harvest to ours!   We will make our harvest date public when  school starts in September.

Thank you Ottawa for all of your support!

Derek Rhodenizer

VP Heritage Academy

http://ottawa.openfile.ca/ottawa/text/local-school-launches-massive-potato-growing-project

also an audio file at:

http://www.cfra.com/chum_audio/Ae.Stephanie.Kinsella.12.04.27.mp3

http://ottawa.openfile.ca/ottawa/text/local-school-launches-massive-potato-growing-project

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2012/04/27/ottawa-potato-barrels-heritage-academy-food-bank.html

Jiu-jitsu in particular has been identified as beneficial for students with dyslexia, as it works student’s memory as well as problem solving.  The physical memorization of patterns and sequences is of great benefit to for memory.   Secondly students will be put in positions where they will need to chose the correct technique to solve the given problem in a physical way.  This is a great, well structured program that promotes respect and discipline and we are excited to offer it at Heritage Academy.