The Edible Schoolyard History
The Edible Schoolyard is a teaching garden and kitchen where children and their families can learn how to grow healthy food and create delicious snacks and meals using fresh, local, organic ingredients. The Edible Schoolyard offers children a chance to build practical gardening and cooking skills, to connect with the natural world and to enjoy nourishing food.
The Greensboro Children's Museum has been selected to be the first children's museum in the country to have an licensed Edible Schoolyard, a program created by Alice Waters and the Chez Panisse Foundation!
The Edible Schoolyard at GCM is expected to serve as a national model for other museums and children’s institutions nationwide promoting health and wellness in young children and families.
Click the link below to watch a brief video on the Edible Schoolyard!
(Thank you to Live Oak Communications for creating this video!)
The Greensboro Children's Museum's Edible Schoolyard, is a model from the first Edible Schoolyard at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley, CA, created by Alice Waters and the Chez Panisse Foundation. Ms. Waters founded the Chez Panisse Foundation (1996) to transform public education through sponsoring projects such as the Edible Schoolyard and the School Lunch Initiative that integrate gardening and cooking into the core academic curriculum while ensuring that nutritious, fresh meals are available to all children at school.
The Edible Schoolyard at GCM includes a half-acre, four-season, organic garden filled with over 40 varieties of vegetables, 40 dwarf fruit trees including apricot, cherry, pear and persimmon, 30 culinary herbs, 25 medicinal herbs and 4 varieties of mushrooms. Other components include indoor and outdoor classrooms, a chicken coop housing a small flock of chickens, a pond, ramadas, arbors, a greenhouse, children's tool shed, winding natural walkways and sitting areas, a cistern, composting and recycling stations and a teaching kitchen where children and families can create recipes, cook food and share meals and conversation together.
