Phoenix High School

The final school we went to was Phoenix High School on Friday the 22nd. It was last but certainly not least! (If you'll excuse my cliche)  Their garden was fully staffed with a manager, community volunteers, and even a nutritionist who ran their markets.  I really love the Learning Zone.  They are a cruicial element to any school garden so a instructer can have a meeting and reflecting space.  This was the first garden I've seen with desks for students to use.

This is the layout of the garden.  Note the new bee area!

The outdoor Learning Zone desks

I really enjoyed presenting my Minneapolis case study school, the Minnesota Internship Charter School (MNIC), to an adult audience at Phoenix.  Both schools have a lot in common in regards to student and community demographics so our presentation sparked a lot of interesting dialogue with the Phoenix instructors we met with.  I was also able to talk with two of the four horticulture students at Phoenix.  I learned about their projects and got lots of ideas for MNIC, since this was the first school we visited with older students.  We hope to set a up a correspondence between their class and the MNIC students in the next couple months. 

Finally, I ate lunch with a woman who teaches several community ed classes at Phoenix, and as we were talking about about the local food movement she said something really great.... "It's just like that Kevin Costner film: if you grow it, they will come."