School Food Infrastructure Fund

This year, we received a grant from Farm to Cafeteria Canada for equipment and supplies to animate school gardens and classrooms, with edible produce grown by students. The project supports up to 11 schools to engage in Microgreens production, including the lights unit, trays, grow media and organic seed. Our seed of choice is Speckled Pea, which was bred for sprout production and grows happily under most conditions, feeding students a tasty nutritious green, raw, cut-and-come-again food. No chemicals are required.

The project also supports a program we call From Slips to Chips, which involves an outdoor raised bed garden, good quality garden soil to fill it, and Sweet Potato slips to grow the roots. The slip is the growing sprout from a mature Sweet Potato. In this case, it's a variety bred for Ontario production, called Radiance. Each slip will form more than one tuber or root, the edible part we're most familiar with, but it should also be noted that the vines, in the Morning Glory family, are edible too. We tested this variety at Eastdale CI this year, and will supply our new partner schools in Spring 2026. Video below shows staffer Tristan Andrews planting the early June crop.

The beauty of both of these crops is that they are suited to the school year - the Microgreens are low-maintenance and highly nutritious, and have been a staple in our programs for years as we learned which Microgreens were the tastiest for kids. The Sweet Potatoes are also a great fit, because you plant the slips in June, water well for the last few weeks of school, and then off you go for the summer. Maybe an occasional watering would be good during summer droughts, but the edible root is forming under the ground no matter what, and students can dig them up in October. Our plan is to then use kitchen equipment to create Sweet Potato Chips, which we thought might be a cool snack for students! We're still in the testing phase of getting the perfect Chip, but stay tuned... air-frying is the way to create a crispy chip that's not too fatty! Chef-teacher Sean Meikle at Eastdale CI is working towards excellence! See the video below with Sunday Harrison, Executive Director of Green Thumbs, plus Gary Hoyer, our researcher-consultant with many years of school food research and advocacy as a college professor; Chef-Teacher Sean Meikle, and Dr. Valerio Primomo, the research scientist from Vineland Research Station who developed the Radiance variety. Video by Abdirahman Mohamed, Green Thumbs' Communications Co-ordinator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW00H2K8mbk