School gardens are becoming an increasingly popular way to promote healthy eating, increase physical exercise opportunities, and promote social and emotional wellness. Research now points the way for how best to create a school garden that will promote positive outcomes for children ranging from concrete increases in fruit and vegetable consumption and a reduction in childhood obesity to more broadly improving overall mental and physical health.

School garden programs can provide multiple benefits for elementary school children. In addition to improvements in diet and nutrition, school gardens provide new areas for learning, recreation, and lessons that encompass developing civic pride and learning about being a good steward of the environment.

Nuts and Bolts

Undertaking a school garden for the first time can feel like a daunting task, but start small and build in a plan for growth.

1. Review Your Available Space

In reviewing potential space near your school to create a garden consider using parts of parking lots, rooftops, places that could be converted into a green house, and unused parts of playgrounds. Also consider community spaces that are near the school, or private places that might allow a garden such as a retirement home, an existing community garden, or a vacant lot.

Take into account any safety concerns, potential water sources, access to sunlight for a minimum of 6 hours a day, and a place that offers the potential for growth. Test the soil for contamination. Soil that is contaminated is not a deal breaker, composting new soil or building raised beds can be the start of your school garden program!

2. Build Community Partnerships

Finding interested community members and businesses can help provide access to resources such as tools, funding, materials, and technical assistance. Use the USDA’s People’s Garden website to get started. The USDA Service Center can also provide you with technical assistance in setting up your school garden. Master Gardening programs and community colleges nearby are a good resource for volunteers that are interested in helping.

3. Check Your Soil

Test your soil to make sure there are not contaminants and to see whether you need to improve the health of the soil. Most soils will need at least some additional nutrients to garden effectively. If a test of your soil shows contaminants, gardening with raised beds is an easy solution so that new soil can be added on top of poor soil in order to grow healthy vegetables.

4. Design Your Garden with Help from Community Stakeholders

Invite parents, community members, students, school leaders, food services staff, and other local community members to help brainstorm ideas for designing the new garden. Develop long-term visions for what your garden might look like in ten years, and short-term practical strategies for building a garden that can be part of the curriculum within less than a year.

5. Choose Plants

Look around at other schools in your area to see what they have had success in growing. Choose plants that are easy to grow and that students will enjoy eating. Select plants that can be part of a curriculum such as a storybook or a science lesson. The most common vegetables to grow in school gardens are lettuce and leafy greens, radishes, carrots, peas, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, and bell peppers.

6. Build Your Garden!

Invite the entire community to help build the garden. It is important to have students actively engaged in the design and building of the garden to promote ownership and pride in their garden.

Ensuring Success: What Works?

Part of an effective school garden program implementation involves integrating gardening and nutrition activities into the school curriculum, providing active learning activities for students to provide authentic and deep learning experiences, and engaging family and school leaders to help promote gardening and healthy nutrition outcomes.

• Integrate Gardening and Nutrition Activities into the Curriculum

Dozens of research studies have shown that using curriculum that includes authentic learning activities such as participation in gardening, hands-on cooking activities, and nutrition exercises tied to gardening activities result in positive health outcomes from children. Students who engage in gardening activities at school, indoors and outdoors, increase their consumption of fruits and vegetables.

• Provide Experiential Learning Opportunities

School garden programs that were the most effective included having students help build the garden, providing taste testing opportunities, engaging in cooking lessons, and providing opportunities to learn about food production such as visits to farms. “Harvest of the Month” (HOTM) programs that included fruit and vegetable tastings, student workbooks, nutrition information presentations, story books, farm-to-school presentations, newsletters for families, and education place mats have been especially effective in increasing students healthy eating habits.

The LA Sprouts program has been particularly successful in providing students with a 12-week experiential learning program that includes gardening, nutrition, and culturally connected cooking activities for low-income Hispanic/Latino students. The program focuses on hands-on learning in a community garden with interactive cooking lessons and gardening instruction. Research on the program found that schools using the program had a significant reduction in obesity and metabolic risk for students.

• Target Family Engagement and Participation

Programs that included robust family engagement activities such as newsletters, take-home activities, volunteer opportunities, social events, dinners, meetings, and garden construction activities were found to be particular effective in improving students’ healthy eating habits and social emotional growth.

• Engage Teachers, School Leaders, and Outside Experts

Getting teachers on board is crucial for program success. At the elementary school level in particular, students look up to teachers and principals as authority figures and role models. Providing teachers with the appropriate training and resources including skill development and research-based pedagogy approaches is essential.

A successful program called Grow to School Countryside Partners has found that clear leadership from lead teachers has been critical to their program’s success. School principals and other school leaders can also take an active role in participating in gardening programs to improve outcomes. Visits from outside experts such as farmers, bee keepers, and others involved in gardening provides authority figures that can greatly increase student interest and engagement, especially if these visits include interactive components.

This article is based, in part, on the following resources:

·        Health promoting schools: integrated practices to develop critical thinking and healthy lifestyles through farming, growing and healthy eating

·        Start A School Garden – Here’s How…

·        School Gardening and Health and Well-Being of School-Aged Children: A Realist Synthesis

·        A clustered randomized controlled trial to determine impacts of the Harvest of the Month program 

Leslie Stebbins is the director of Research4Ed. She has more than twenty-five years of experience in higher education and K-12 learning and instructional design. She has an M.Ed. from the Technology Innovation & Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Master’s in Library and Information Science from Simmons College.