The Farm to School Committee at Grafton Elementary School worked closely with Food Connects to enhance our garden program last year. With the generous support of the Windham Northeast Supervisory Union and the Windham Foundation, we were able to build six large raised beds for vegetables, and four smaller raised beds for our pollinator garden.

Parents, staff, and students worked hard to assemble the beds and plant starts, seeds, and perennials. Many of the flower and vegetable starts had been grown inside the school. In addition to learning about plant and seed anatomy, and pollination, students learned about what seeds need to grow. Over the summer, the beds were tended by two GES families. Despite some typical gardening challenges such as too much rain, and in our case, one very pesky woodchuck, our gardens flourished! As most gardeners do, we lost some crops, mainly corn and sunflowers.(Mostly to the woodchuck.) But the ones eschewed by the woodchuck were happily harvested this fall and made into a fragrant and colorful harvest soup by the entire student body.

Our soup was full of carrots, potatoes, and squash, leaving us enough squash for our upcoming Thanksgiving feast, and enough potatoes to make latkes for all in December. Our beets will be pickled this week. It has been exciting and fun for the students to have a hand in providing the school food they have started from seed and tended along the way.

We are looking forward to next year! And now we are a little more educated about what can be the most successful, namely woodchuck-resistant, in our gardens. Perhaps we’ll skip the corn and kale, opting for onions and peppers. And we’re planting garlic this week! We are full of hope that next year’s gardens will yield an even better harvest for our 2nd Annual GES Harvest Soup.

- Vanessa Stern