Intro to School Garden: Spring Coaching Session (Maintenance, Workdays, and Cooking with Youth)

Overview

Join us for the School Garden Partners ’26-’27 Coaching Sessions designed for educators and school staff at any experience level. Learn best practices for planning, planting, and maintaining a thriving school garden. Connect with fellow educators, share ideas, and gather tools to grow a garden that engages students and supports your school community.

Spring Session - Sustaining & Engaging

This Saturday session will cover the following topics, with ample space for discussion, Q&A, knowledge sharing, hands-on practice + free takeaways. Lunch is included, and the session will be in mixed indoor-outdoor classroom settings with a short walk in a garden.

• Garden Maintenance 101

  Once the beds are built and the seeds are planted, how do we help our garden thrive? This session covers planting strategies, pest management, watering routines, harvesting tips, and so much more! We'll support you in creating a maintenance plan that works for your school community, balancing seasonal tasks with sustainability and student engagement.

• Organizing a Community Workday

  Planning is just the beginning; our community will sustain the garden over time! We’ll explore how to organize engaging garden workdays, from setting clear goals to ensuring everyone feels included and valued.

• Cooking with Youth and Community
  Who doesn’t love a good snack and the joy of sharing it with others? We will round out the day exploring cooking with young chefs and try out our favorite tools, techniques, and approaches to family-style dining, whether indoors or outdoors in the garden. We'll share tips and tricks to guide students through interactive cooking experiences and make food fun and engaging. This is also our moment to celebrate together, reflect on what we've learned, and hopefully leave inspired to continue this amazing garden work with students and our school communities.

Come ready with your garden layout, design, or a few photos of your space. We’ll sketch, plan, and leave you with tools to support a successful planting, workday, and programming season. Participants will take home maintenance tips, tool recommendations, recipes, lesson plans, key contacts, free seeds/seedlings, and more!

All sessions will feature adaptable, kid-friendly activities and highlight curricular-connections; we request that you note via Humanitix if young people will attend with you + please share any additional accomodations we should consider to support your learning!

See you in the Garden 🌼