A unique community garden sits down the road from our campus. It holds an array of multi-colored soil and produce growing in varying stages. Within close distance is a urban community of tall commercial buildings structured around the Zhishan Station ecosystem, including a busy supermarket filled with neatly packaged groceries. These buildings towers over the comparatively primitive plot of garden space. The garden nevertheless hints at our school’s neighborhood history as farm lands, and it lays bare the vital knowledge of farming as it crucially sustains our everyday living.
As part of our grade six design unit “designing an urban garden”, students visited the 德行里community garden to take witness to the rare sight of fresh produce growing in highly urbanized spaces. Upon reflection, Erin and Alisa noticed the creative and unique ways to design a garden, Ray H and Oliver noted the difficulty of growing produce, and Violet realized now that “farms can be run by anyone”.
With inspiration from a developed urban garden, students will begin to create designs of planter boxes, which would initiate our own urban garden in our back hallway. While our back hallways is currently void of all garden tools, Melody reflects that “I used to think garden is not that [easy] to find, but now I think you can find garden every way you go”. With the grade six designer’s creativity and hard work, our back hallway may turn into the neighborhood’s next urban garden!