Fall harvests in the Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming

Some beets growing in the garden!

This fall the Garden2Table team had more visits than ever to the Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming! Steph and Steven did an incredible job ensuring that all the students had a great time harvesting vegetables from the garden then bringing them up to the cooking labs to cook up a feast.

If you have never been down to the GCUOF you need to go and check it out at some point! We cannot emphasize enough that we could not have this program without the garden and we are so incredibly thankful and proud of the work that Martha Gay and her team do.

During the fall we brought 95 students through the garden, here's a quick recap of our visits:

On Thursday October 3rd, we brought 24 grade 4 students from Jean Little Public School to the Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming. We had a tour of the garden and then harvested some fresh vegetables! The kids then joined us in the cooking lab where we helped them prepare kale chips, butternut squash fries and roasted beet and goat cheese salad. The kids all took home something they harvested and were excited to tell their parents how much they loved kale!

Some new favourites- butternut squash fries & kale chips

On Wednesday October 9th we had 26 grade 7 students from St. Ignatius Catholic School in the garden. We harvested turnips, radishes, carrots, celery then washed and chopped them up and ate them right in the garden! We were then joined by Chef Shea Robinson who lead us in a dressing demo and taught us how to make some great dips to have with our veggies.

Quick tour of the garden before harvesting

Chef Shea helping us making dressings and dips for our veggies

Wednesday October 16th was our biggest G2T day! We brought 45 grade 2ʼs to the garden and then back to the kitchen lab. In the lab we were joined by Chef Erika who helped us make individual pizzas topped with fresh veggies from the garden that the students had harvested themselves!

Getting excited to be in the garden!

Learning from Bruce in the greenhouse

Searching for frogs in the pond

Back in the lab, ready to make pizzas

Some of our delicious pizzas!

Hopefully this has given you a little sneak peak of the garden visits we had in the fall. It definitely kept us busy but we were so happy that Steph and Steven were able to organize all these visits which allowed us to reach out to so many children. Thanks to all the guest chefs for helping us in the kitchen, the other student volunteers, and huge thank you to the GCUOF for all their help, allowing us to use their garden and for all the delicious vegetables!