Mindfood profiles Garden to Table.

Garden to Table’s programme and kaupapa was profiled in Mindfood magazine’s April 2021 issue. Here’s a snippet:

WATCHING OUR CHILDREN GROW

School gardens are teaching students more than how to grow, harvest, prepare and share food. They are also helping kids improve their literacy and social skills, enhance their wellbeing and giving them a foundation for healthy eating for life.

There is a different kind of learning going on in schools across Australia and New Zealand. In these lessons, the classroom is outdoors. Instead of a whiteboard, they have a garden. Instead of a pen and paper, they have a shovel and gloves.

School gardens are not a novel concept. They were thought to have started as early as 1819 in Germany; they were even prescribed by law in countries such as Austria and Sweden in 1869, Yet nowadays, these school gardens are doing much more than growing food. Their benefits reach beyond gardening and food education to improving financial and literacy skills, environmental knowledge, physical health and mental and social wellbeing for students.

“Our programme is in the ‘solutions world’,” says Ani Brunet. She is the chief executive officer of the Garden to Table Charitable Trust, a New Zealand charity that works with primary-school-aged children in a curriculum-integrated gardening and food education programme.

“These life skills empower children to make a difference,” she says. “Learning to grow, harvest, prepare and share food makes a positive difference in a wide range of areas from health and wellbeing, food resilience and food poverty, climate change and sustainability, through to social connection and mental health.”

Read more at https://www.mindfood.com/article/how-school-gardens-are-teaching-students-skills-for-life/