School Garden

More than where our students excitedly get their hands dirty and beautiful and delicious pesticide-free, vine-ripe tomatoes grow, the St. Margaret’s all-school Garden is a place of wonder, activity, lifecycle, exploration and discovery. It’s an outdoor science lab and a social meeting hub. It is a place where classroom learning and experimentation converge to bring real-life application to many important scientific concepts.

 

This all-school garden is a place where students learn concepts with far wider application than growing a vegetable for the first time or watching soil decompose to make renewed, nutritious earth. Rather the focus can be on understanding delayed gratification, waiting for that one perfect strawberry to turn a deep shade of red, or the role that life cycles play in our interconnectedness.

 

The school garden is an outdoor classroom where students across all divisions engage their intellectual curiosity and are encouraged to discover something new. This leads to a sense of wonder and appreciation for our natural world, and a commitment to preserving and protecting these experiences for others.

 

Each season the garden transitions to the next with the help of students and faculty, to be a lively space where edible food is the byproduct of hard work, patience, and science. Three times a year, vegetables, such as beets, broccoli, snap peas, squash, lettuce, radishes and carrots are harvested. Students savor the taste of something they had a hand in growing, this is the ultimate connection. An abundance of a particular crop is donated to Fr. Serra's Food Pantry in San Juan Capistrano.

 

When nature and education work in harmony, as they do in the garden, members of the school community are rewarded with beautiful examples of sustainable food, to appreciate and enjoy.