Hello, My name is Maureen Lynn and I run a Plant Club at Brooks Composite High School, in Brooks Alberta. This is the Plant Club’s second year, and our students focus on growing food, and in the winter we tend to the school’s indoor plants. This is a year round extracurricular activity club for our grade 10-12 students. We have 10 regular students who meet twice a week during lunch hour. We have a culturally rich community, and food security can be of concern, as such we like to promote growing food as one way to address food insecurity. The students were so thrilled to receive a box FULL of SEEDS! Wow, this is so generous of West Coast Seeds. We quickly got started with seedlings, and in May we planted one raised garden bed. At the time of this writing we have five in total! Our garden is accessible to the entire student body, and over the summer months, to the community.
The second use of the seeds was a school wide activity to promote the benefits of gardening and caring for plants. Since we had many seeds, the students asked if we could offer a seed bomb making activity, during the school's Wellness Fair. We had a great turn out, and approximately 80 students and staff made seed bombs. We used the native seed mix, and the sunflower seeds. In addition to learning how to make seed bombs students also researched the use and history of seed bombs.
We are assisting 80+ students right now.
Myself and my students in Plant Club, hope to inspire other students to grow their own food, and to care for our native pollinators by growing native plants.
At the end of the year, students in Plant Club reflected and shared that gardening is their favorite activity, many of them shared that it makes them feel relaxed. During the seed bomb making many other students were excited to dealing with stress of exam season, but squishing clay, and creating a seed bomb.
Brooks is the city of 100 hellos! We have people from all over the world, and we easily have 100 diferent languages spoken in our school. We are interested in learning more about gardening methods and plants from the countries that our students immigrated from.