SCHOOL GARDEN: CHARACTERISTICS, TYPES AND BENEFITS - ENVIRONMENT - 2025

The school garden is a natural and living laboratory that consists of a land of small proportions, usually fenced, in which the land is prepared for the sowing of plants, vegetables, legumes, fruit trees, among others.

This garden is used during basic education to reinforce attitudes and values ​​in students towards healthy eating, caring for the environment and the ability to get food through their own means.

The knowledge of the development processes of plants helps students to appreciate more the value of nature and the foods they eat, since they understand where they come from and how they grow.

Therefore, education within the school garden is considered an important element in achieving the goal of food security.

That is, the objective of ensuring that all people have access to a healthy diet and have knowledge about how to eat a healthy diet.

Main features

1- Includes experimentation

The school garden allows students to directly experience the cultivation and planting of plants and food within natural fields. In this way, they can reconcile the relationship between theory and practice, and they learn as they do.

Experimentation gives students the opportunity to acquire greater skills to have a better quality of their own, family and community life through healthy eating.

2- The teacher has the role of counselor

The role of the teacher in the development of the school garden is crucial so that students can learn effectively, since they must be able to generate meaningful experiences that awaken the motivation and curiosity of the students.

It is who is in charge of planning, organizing and guiding each experience within the garden, with the aim of facilitating the understanding of the theory through its implementation in practice.

The teacher must ensure that, through the school garden, students really internalize and understand the contents devised in school curricular planning, efficiently establishing cause and effect relationships and ensuring that students correctly apply the knowledge learned in the classroom.

3- The work consists of a series of steps

The steps that must be completed in the process of cultivating the school garden are the following:

- Soil preparation and tillage

- Irrigation of the land

- Planting the seed

- Weeding, mulch and add compost

- Constant irrigation of the field, according to the specific needs of the food

- Add roads and fences

- Harvest

- Prepare, cook and preserve food

- Package and label them

- Serve and distribute them

- Promotion and celebration of garden events

4- The work is structured in small groups

The activities within the garden are not carried out individually, but are structured through the formation of small groups of students.

5- The evaluation is qualitative

The type of evaluation that is made to the students within the school garden is of the qualitative type, which is one that seeks to measure or assess the quality of each student's use within the learning process in a continuous and comprehensive way.

6- Content structured according to the level of understanding

The school garden is a didactic resource that is applied throughout basic education. Therefore, the contents that are taught through this are planned according to the different levels of understanding of the students.

7- You can integrate knowledge from different areas of study

In a study carried out by Andoni González for the International University of La Rioja, it is ensured that in the work carried out in the garden, students should not only apply knowledge related to natural sciences, but also to other areas such as linguistics, mathematics, physics, social sciences and technology.

Types of school gardens

Soil gardens

They are school gardens that are built directly on natural soil, using the land found in them.

In these types of gardens, teachers and students must ensure that the type of land is adequate for growing plants.

Potted gardens

They are the gardens that are built inside flowerpots. This type of orchards generally occur in highly urbanized spaces that do not have the necessary natural conditions.

In these orchards, as in the cultivation tables, the land used must be purchased commercially from a specialized site.

Grow tables

The cultivation tables are gardens that are built within tables, which have a certain height if you want the plants to be located at a higher height from the ground.

Traditional agriculture orchards

They are the orchards in which a traditional agricultural process is implemented, which means that there is no qualm about using tools such as chemical fertilizers, insecticides, among others.

Orchards with agroecological techniques

They are ecological gardens in which purely natural techniques are used within the cultivation process, avoiding the use of synthetic or inorganic chemicals.

Benefits

The school garden as a learning resource generates basic knowledge about food security, and also generates a series of benefits for students. Some of these benefits are as follows:

- It allows students to reinforce values ​​and attitudes directed towards healthy eating, caring for the environment and the ability to produce their own food

- It encourages teamwork and the understanding of the division of labor, since for its creation and maintenance, students must work in small groups.

- It encourages the use of ingenuity, initiative and innovation in project design through the completion of the entire cycle mentioned above.

- Helps students value the environment, love and respect nature, and understand it so that they can take advantage of its riches in a sustainable way.

- It fosters feelings of solidarity, coexistence, tolerance, companionship and brotherhood in students.

- It strengthens the students' capacity for autonomy, since the teacher's role is exclusively that of an advisor and guide, and it is required that they plan and make decisions for themselves.

- Helps to unite scientific and theoretical knowledge with daily life, by applying the theory of natural sciences in the garden.

- Helps to increase the environmental quality of the schools where they are implemented.

- It fosters a greater disposition in students to have responsible attitudes towards nature, which, if well apprehended by them, can be relayed to the family and community environment.

- It has a positive influence on the students having a healthy physical condition, thanks to the physical effort required to prepare and maintain the garden.

References

1. González, A. (2013). Evaluation of the school garden as a didactic resource: facilitators and associated barriers in secondary education in educational centers in Barcelona ascribed to the School Agenda 21. Accessed October 16, 2017 on the World Wide Web: reunite.unir.net
2. Muñoz, L. (2015). 5 classifications of orchards. Consulted on October 16, 2017 on the World Wide Web: agrohuerto.com
3. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations FAO. The School Garden as a Teaching-Learning Resource of the Subjects of the Basic Education Curriculum. Retrieved October 16, 2017 on the World Wide Web: fao.org
4. Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia. Orchard. Retrieved October 16, 2017 on the World Wide Web: wikipedia.org