School Projects

The School Garden is one of the many Food Program projects on Galiano. Coordinators and community volunteers work with the kids, teaching them about gardening, ecology and how to grow food. Kids are involved in planning, tastings, and cooking their harvest. The Food Program also organizes a mini Nettlefest and Applefest for the kids.

The School Garden has a long and impressive lineage of Coordinators cultivating enthusiasm for gardening. Galiano students have had the opportunity to learn alongside Janice Oakley, Colleen Doty, Janna Feldman, and, most recently, Brahmi Benner.

Brahmi brought an educator’s perspective to the role, emphasizing open-ended, playful exploration of the children’s interests, as well as giving the children a safe place to practice with real tools to build skills. Brahmi is moving on and she will be much missed by the Food Program team and the kids and staff at the school for the amazing enthusiasm she brought to every event.

organic garden in my backyard. After working as a native plant nursery manager, my experience expanded to include a deep knowledge of food uses, plant propagation and seed saving of local plants.”

Patti holds a science degree and became a teacher, hoping that she would be able to work with the Galiano community. She is thrilled to have this opportunity to help with the school garden and to share what she knows with the Galiano students.

In the coming weeks, Patti will spend time getting students excited about the garden, planting seeds and doing some science. Students have begun a science experiment to study the effects of temperature on germination and will plant their results.

A school garden thrives when the coordinator is able to spend their time focusing on education and exploration, and the maintenance of the garden is shared between students and community volunteers. We invite you to join Patti at the garden and have some fun in the sun. This is also an opportunity to learn in a hands-on way. If you’re interested, please email Patti.

In the summer, the Food Program will be posting this position for a permanent Coordinator – see Facebook or email the Food Program for more information.

That March morning the school library was warm and smelled of cedar, beeswax. Weeks of anticipation–“When will they arrive?”–culminated. As two students and I approach the covered case, one student hyperventilates. “It’s ok,” I say. “The bees are behind glass.” We speak in hushed tones, overcome by rhythmic buzzing. I lift the cloth cover and we three exhale: ten-thousand pairs of wings shimmer on striped bodies.

In collaboration with Galiano Community School Principal Shannon Johnston, staff, teachers, and local beekeeper Brad Lockett, the Food Program received a grant from BeeCause.org and Whole Kids Foundation for an observation honeybee hive. The goal of BeeCause.org is to raise a generation of kids who love bees and respect the role they play in our ecosystem and food chain. BeeCause hopes to install 1000 hives in schools. Our school was the first and only, so far, in Canada to receive such an observation hive. To date, 174 other schools in the US, Haiti and the Bahamas have received hives.

Our school has embraced the bees. Now that the kids have experienced how gentle the bees are the initial fear has evaporated. Together, everyone’s been learning. “A bee only makes 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in its entire life,” states Sophia. Dylan notes: “To make honey, bees regurgitate nectar from one of their stomachs…” The bees pass nectar from bee to bee until the desired consistency and water content are reached. The flavour of honey reflects the local pollinated flora.

“Our” bees access the outdoors through a tube drilled through the school wall. From outside, the hole sits three and half metres from the ground and looks like a bird house. A bee exits the tube and flies across the playground carrying another bee. “She’s removing the dead,” says Claire. “The girl bees do all the work!” exclaims Shekayah with a hint of indignation. It’s recess and the playground is filled with a cacophony only children can make: running, watching Leo the Lizard in the sand box. Meanwhile, honey bees fly overhead, an image of how things should be; all right in the world.

“Maybe we should check on the bees today,” suggests Finn. He means from inside the school library, to observe them through the case. I explain that we’re going to leave the bees quiet and dark to allow the queen to build up her brood. For now, we’ll watch them outside in the school garden, enjoying the blue flowers of borage, the asparagus that’s been allowed to bloom and the raspberry flowers that are appearing. The pear tree, we notice, has a particularly good fruit set this year. We have thousands of new friends to thank for this.

December was ushered in with the Great Bigleaf Rake-Up at the school garden. With maple leaves buried under a dusting of crunchy snow, blue sky above, Galiano School kids gathered around two large maple trees on the school property to learn about densely rich maple leaves and the value they bring to other plants when composted. The kids were divided into four teams: Calcium, Magnesium, Potassium, and Nitrogen, and each team learned some interesting facts about these four elements that figure prominently in maple leaves. What also became quickly apparent was how humans and plants require the same nutrients in order to thrive! For example, blossom End Rot in tomatoes and osteoporosis in humans are both related to calcium deficiency. In another example, magnesium is required by plants to process and use amino acids, vitamins, and proteins, and similarly for humans, magnesium is used to process other elements, notably calcium and potassium. Whereas magnesium deficiency will result in yellow, veiny leaves in plants, a deficiency in humans will impact the functioning of muscles and organs.

The teams then gathered up fallen leaves and laid them around garden beds and the fruit trees in the school garden. Our garlic, kale, chard, and fruit trees were tucked in with several layers of rich maple leaves.

In our fragile Coastal Douglas Fir ecosystem, bigleaf maples can be seen as competitors to slower growing species such as the hemlock, Douglas fir, grand fir, and sitka spruce (Thomas, K.D., 1999; Haeussler S. et al 1990). Bigleaf maples have a large canopy that blocks light to trees below; their heavy litterfall can smother slower-growing saplings; maples have a shallow and wide-spreading root system that likely has a competitive advantage in shallow soils. However, bigleaf maples can play a significant role in nutrient cycling (Turk, 2003). As the leaves decompose, elements inside the leaves make nutrients available for biological growth. The forest floor around bigleaf maples is significantly high in available nutrients, most notably nitrogen, potassium, calcium and magnesium, and contains higher levels of most nutrients than conifer litterfall. Another bonus for the garden is that maple leaves decompose and lose their mass relatively quickly, thus rapidly cycling nutrients.

Bigleaf maples also play an important role in enhancing biodiversity by hosting a large number of epiphytes. An epiphyte is a plant that grows non-parasitically upon another plant, and derives its moisture and nutrients from the air, rain and sometimes debris from other organisms. Ferns, lichens, and mosses are examples of epiphytes. Maples are very popular hosts!

As we arranged the leaves over the beds and stood back to admire the russet hues against the snow, my mind jumped ahead to spring. It won’t be long before we’ll be drizzling syrup over Maple Blossom Fritters.

In the words of one student: “Applefest is the best day EVER!” This year’s fun-filled, educational event will be held Wednesday, October 22nd, from 1-3pm at the Galiano Community School.

We are looking for donations of apple varieties for tastings. If you can spare a few apples for some tastings, or are able to volunteer your time to help us set up and run the activity stations, please contact Colleen at galianofoodprograms@gmail.com.

Thank you and we hope you can help support this special event for the kids.

I thought I’d use this article to talk about some of the ways to get kids cooking. Kids that learn how to cook, are much more likely to try new foods and be less picky eaters when they’ve made the food themselves. I’m lucky enough to get to cook with the kids at the school on a regular basis – and I have two kids of my own, who also have lots of friends, that like to play in the kitchen – so whether you’ve got your own kids home for the summer, or grand kids visiting – here are some ideas.

I have a few basic kitchen rules – wash your hands (can’t repeat this one enough) and when you are cooking with younger kids it also means no wearing bowls on heads and no licking measuring spoons (I’ve seen it all!) – while you are cooking – once you are done bowl helmets are just fine. I also try to keep long hair up – off the shoulders – use a hair band, or bandana.

Get the kids involved in planning? Ask them what they’d like to make. When I’ve done this with small groups at the school, the answers have ranged from crepes to burgers, pizza to apple pie. I have yet to meet a kid with nothing they wanted to learn how to cook. So start there.

What I do have kids say, is “I couldn’t do that”. But they can. I teach 5 year olds how to bake bread. They can do it – with help and support, but measuring, mixing, are all things they do in play – this is just doing it for real. When cooking with kids it helps to have all the ingredients you are going to need out on the counter before you begin, plus the measuring cups and spoons and any other equipment you will need.

There are lots of recipe books designed for kids, or find a simple recipe online – print it out so that you can read through it together. When cooking, start at the beginning at go through slowly, step at a time. And sometimes you don’t need a recipe. One of my kids likes to “create” their own recipes. When the twins were four they learned how to melt chocolate chips in the microwave. Then they tried adding all kinds of things until they hit upon pecans – and “invented” chocolate covered nuts!

Nothing beats the satisfaction of being able to bring your own food to the table, or your own plate of brownies to guests.

Over two days at the end of April – the students in each class will be making their own loaves of bread – from scratch.

Last year the bread-workshop for the Primary class was a huge success – the kids thrilled to have made their very own bread.