School Gardening – Future for the Far North

What is it about?
Organic School gardening in the Canadian Far North. You might ask: Is it really possible? The answer is: yes, it is.
I have been working in remote areas of Mongolia where the winter temperature drops far bellow – 40 degrees Celsius. We were introducing farming to the local nomadic communities. Before our project began, hardly any vegetable could be harvested because the season was to cold and short. However, my background in sustainable building enabled me to design a special type of passive solar greenhouse that could maximize the local conditions. And the change happened.
With the community, we built a couple of these passive solar greenhouses from locally available sources (mostly with what we could find on the ground with the exception of good quality plastic sheets to cover the greenhouse), and the effect was incredible.
How does it work?
We could accumulate energy from sun inside the greenhouse – with materials like rocks, clay and water -- and use this energy when the sun did not warm the greenhouse enough by itself. By doing this we extended the growing season by almost two months which was enough to reach two harvests in one year, in coldest areas of Mongolia.
What was the community perception?
But the greenhouse by itself does not create change. We experienced extremely little initial interest in farming from the nomadic communities. However, the reality was that these communities could not sustain themselves on breeding animals (as they had previously), because of climate change (warmer seasons brought droughts, ground water dropped and green pastures are slowly changing into dry deserts). However there was still enough surface water to provide sustainable low-cost drip irrigation in greenhouses.
We were facing the issue of cultural change forced by environmental change similar to the situation Inuit people are facing today.
As a result, we started with a school organic farming program. We encouraged the community to help us build passive solar greenhouses just next to the schools; we developed school gardening education (using pictograms) and trained local teachers.
Why the school farming?
Teachers and children in the school were really motivated and took care of the plants (various vegetables and fruit) in the greenhouses and successfully reached the first harvest. They harvested lettuce, cucumbers, spinach but also tomatoes and watermelons – products they have never before been able to plant or even buy, because of high prices of imported produce.
In this way, children in the schools could get a valuable source of nutrients, they gained the farming skills and experience, even before they left the elementary school, but the effect was much stronger…
How is it disseminated to the community?
After the harvest children ate part of the vegetable and fruit directly in the school. But part of the harvest was carried home and showed to parents and other family members. This started an unbelievable increase in interest by the community in farming. This success was the impetus for us to start with new level of the project –community passive solar greenhouse construction.
I came back to the project villages after two years and I could see the real result of our project. Instead of one greenhouse at the school there were tens of greenhouses in each village. Some people started to plant vegetables and fruit just for their own consumption, some for marketing and some people were just buying the produce on the local market. People made several improvements on my design, but the initial idea survived.