The Garden to Table (GTT) program is an initiative launched by the Growe Foundation in 2005 and started at Community Montessori during the 2008-2009 school year. The Garden to Table program is aimed at enriching school education and inspiring students to adopt healthy and sustainable lifestyles. The theme-based program allows teachers to integrate lessons with core curriculum and provide students with hands-on learning opportunities to connect to the food they put in their bodies and the environment that supports its growth.
One of the easiest ways for children to work toward lifelong health is to cultivate healthy lifestyle habits from childhood and to help young people learn about where food comes from, how it is grown and how it is distributed. Finding healthy alternatives to processed foods and ways to consume more locally grown foods is key.
The program is based upon four components:
• Connecting children to people in the community who understand how to work in harmony with nature to grow food.
• Providing students with knowledge about how their lifestyle choices affect personal and planetary wellness, through education about organic gardens, nutrition, culinary traditions, and the importance of environmental sustainability.
• Focusing on skill-building activities such as gardening, cooking, healthy eating, and environmentally sustainable practices.
• Empowering students to apply what they have learned in the program to their everyday lives.
If you want to read more about the Garden to Table program, download the 
GTTToolkit_2009.pdf or visit the Growe Foundation’s web page.
We’re always looking for parent volunteers – if you’re interested email volunteer parent Jess Hernandez. Her contact info can be found in the current student directory.
Garden Timeline
In March of 2009 Community Montessori parents, students, teachers and staff worked together with Growe Foundation staff to build an organic garden in the courtyard.
At the end of the 2009 school year, students harvested salad greens and worked with chefs from The Kitchen to prepare salad dressings. GardenToTableSaladDressingRecipes.pdf. The salad and dressings were served to all students on the Harvest Bar. The activity was a great success, with the youngest and the oldest students working side by side.
The garden was ripe with vegetables and activity during the fall of 2009. Many students harvested vegetables and made salsa, zucchini bread and pesto with parent volunteers. Others picked cherry tomatoes or nasturtiums and ate them right out of the garden (after washing them of course). Every student in the school got to sample squash soup that parent chef, Marie Nicoletti cooked with vegetables from the garden and student help.
Gardens: The Montessori Way - by a teacher from the 1930s
“Our children gardened, sometimes an hour a day. The materials were always there: wheelbarrows, rakes, hoes, shovels, spades, watering cans, and baskets. Children chose the activity. And of course, all knowledge takes off from gardening. You must choose a place for your garden. It must be flat, or the rain will roll away from the seeds. Let’s measure the space that can be well taken care of as opposed to a garden too big for total attention. Find a place in the sun. Plants need sunlight to make food. What to plant? Foods for salad, foods for soup, and foods to eat right off the plant—all these make a garden of variety. The work that the children enjoy most is harvesting, and because our school went nearly year around, the children would reap what they sowed.
Through cooking, children are introduced to a whole new world of sensations—tastes, smells, colors, textures, blending and changing—all that cooking entails. They are given the opportunity to explore the otherwise forbidden realm of knives and fires. Working with the tools of cooking develops manual dexterity. And of course cooking and eating is an occasion for interaction with one another.
We had a full-course meal daily. We ate with the children and discussed their experiences in the parks, museums, their parties, etc. They talked about future events and past events, always making laughter and jokes. The eating and talking alone usually took an hour.
Introduction of foods and their preparation is still another form of sensory exploration. Noodle-making, bread-making, peeling, cutting, grinding, chopping, slicing, grating, squeezing—these are not only ways of extracting from nature what you need to eat, but great builders of hand-eye coordination, sequence and social life.”
**(Margot Waltuch, 1996, describing a day at the Montessori school where she taught during the years 1933 to 1938.) Waltuch, M. (1996). The casa of Sevres, France. The Journal, 21 (3), 43-54.