Garden

The garden is a place where Kindergarten-5th graders go every Monday and Tuesday. The garden teacher currently is Katherine Grace.

Welcome
Salmon Creek School Garden is nestled in the Freestone Valley of Sonoma County. We are a 1 1/2 acre education and production garden whose focus is to connect children to their local food and watersheds through weekly gardening, farming, cooking, and nature awareness classes.

Our Story
A school garden that inspires in children a love for learning; providing a space to enhance classroom curriculum through hands-on experiments, while deepening their awareness of the connection between all living things.

It all began in 2004 when Laurel Anderson, former Garden Teacher and founding member of the Sonoma County School Garden Network, came together with a small team of dedicated parents and teachers to create a garden that would quickly become one of California's largest and most well established School Gardens. Located in the Freestone Valley in Northern California, the 1 1/2 acre garden is a part of a 56 acre school campus blessed with a diverse coastal ecosystem containing a redwood forest, Native grasslands, wetlands, Salmon Creek, and rich soil that supports the acre garden. Nearly a decade since the project was initiated, the garden now produces enough to support both the cafeteria and the cooking programs. Students attend weekly gardening, farming, and cooking classes that act as a time to build their skills in an outdoor setting and root their classroom topics in hands-on practical activities. Parents sign up to volunteer as garden docents, supporting the education program. Students learn to grow and taste new foods, developing awareness of foods that will nourish them. By participating in the garden program, students learn from their experience, bringing home excitement and new knowledge to their families and our community. Placed Based LearningThe garden was founded in many respects to support place-based education for elementary and middle school students at our public school campus. According to David Sobel,  place-based education
 * Connecting children to their local food and watersheds through weekly gardening, farming, cooking, and nature awareness classes.
 * Leading the way towards a more equitable and sustainable local economy through partnerships with local farmers for the Farm to School lunch program on campus.
 * Helping to facilitate a lifetime friendship between children and the natural world; a relationship founded in reverence, respect, and joy.

"is a process of using the local community and environment as a starting point to teach concepts in language arts, mathematics, social studies, science and other subjects across the curriculum. Emphasizing hands-on, real-world learning experiences, this approach to education increases academic achievement, helps students develop stronger ties to their community, enhances students appreciation for the natural world and creates a heightened commitment to serving as active, contributing citizens ."

Garden Recipes
For garden recipes, click here