View our gardens
Winchester Public School is our longest-running school food garden, started in 2001. It’s an unusually large school garden and for this reason has become a destination for many visiting school groups, workshops and presentations as well as a food-producing garden feeding 400 kindergarten to Grade 8 students. As of Spring 2025, there will be a capital project that will result in losing some of the garden space. Students plant and harvest both formally as part of class time with specific curriculum objectives, and informally through the Garden Club, which operates one day per week throughout the school year during lunch recess. Vegetables and fruits go into the hot lunch program at the school and the food waste goes back into the outdoor compost bins. Summer programs in the school garden are also offered to local camps and day cares, and families through evening garden drop-ins. Youth are hired and trained to garden, design and implement programs. This keeps the garden maintained and the produce flowing to local families in need throughout summer.
Rose Avenue Public School is located in the St. James Town community of high-rise apartment buildings. The school serves a student population of over 700 students from kindergarten through Grade 6. More than 85% of the students have English as their second language, representing about 50 language groups. Most of the families of this school recently arrived from other countries – many from Sri Lanka, and an increasing number from Eastern European, Asian and African countries. As a TDSB EcoSchools, the school has been developing an environmentally sustainable set of practices, into which gardening and composting fit quite well.Garden development began in earnest in Spring 2007, with a design for a children’s garden in the part-sun location at the northwest corner of the property.
Sprucecourt Public School's Peace Garden was an initiative begun in 2009 by Lead2Peace, a youth organization in Regent Park. In 2010, Green Thumbs Growing Kids got involved to help build up the food gardening part of their curriculum, and we work in partnership with students, teachers, lunchroom staff and Lead2Peace. With funding from Community Service Partnerships at the City of Toronto, we helped to expand food production by maintaining the existing peace garden and also installed four new raised beds, a compost program and container gardening. The school population averages around 300 students, from kindergarten to Grade Six, many of whom are second and third language learners. The largest language groups other than English are Bengali, Mandarin, Cantonese, Tamil, Vietnamese, and Somali according to the Toronto District School Board.
Eastdale Collegiate Institute has a large rooftop garden maintained by us and supports a diverse group of students, including many neurodiverse learners who really enjoy our garden programming. Gardening gives students a hands-on space where they can learn, explore, and feel proud of their work. We are excited to continue working at Eastdale CI and spending more time in the garden together. In June 2025 students planted sweet potato slips in the rooftop beds and in October they harvested over 180 kilograms of sweet potatoes!
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