Our garden-based activities offer an assortment of lengths and formats. Activities can be appropriate for one afternoon, a six week project, or can be incorporated into a longer program. Formats vary from one-pagers to full length publications.
Highlighted activities and resources:
- Project S.O.W. (Seeds of Wonder): Food Gardening with Justice in Mind – Youth work together to investigate how to grow food, explore their relationship with the land and food system, and practice leadership in their communities.
- Gardening in Our Warming World: Youth Grow! – Climate change activities for youth that empower instead of alarm.
- Seed to Salad – Youth grow salad gardens, with emphasis on decision-making and a multidisciplinary approach, including nutrition, physical activity, math, and language arts.
- Dig Art! Cultivating Creativity in the Garden – Integrates gardening with the arts through activities that teach ecological literacy through visual art, music, performance, and more.
- Plants and Textiles – Focuses on past and present technologies that convert plants into products. Activities include making paper, ropes, indigo dye, mat weaving and knotted nets.
- Curriculum classics and other great resources – Explore food systems, art, climate change, and our Horticulture and Human Culture series (including The Three Sisters: Exploring an Iroquois Garden).
- Short activities – Short, stand-alone lessons.
- Youth citizen science – Discover how gardeners of all ages and experience levels are sharing local observations that help address research questions and lead to gardening success.
- Educator Planning Tools – Resources to help you organize, promote, sustain, and evaluate your program.
Featured curriculum
Project S.O.W: Food Gardening with Justice in Mind
The Project S.O.W. (Seeds of Wonder): Food Gardening with Justice in Mind curriculum, created for educators who work with young people ages 13-19, centers personal growth, community connection, and equity. Project S.O.W. has been created for groups of 6 to 20 participants, yet is adaptable to smaller and larger groups, and can be used in a wide variety of school, afterschool, and community settings. All youth engaged in Project S.O.W. are encouraged to have a food gardening experience. The curriculum has been designed with flexibility to support youth having diverse growing experiences- indoors or outdoors; in containers or the ground. We define a garden as any space in which you intentionally cultivate plants.
Project S.O.W. complements and integrates well with Cornell Garden-Based Learning’s Seed to Supper program, a program for adult gardeners. Seed to Supper is an accessible gardening course that gives beginner gardeners the tools they need to connect with others in community, grow in confidence, and successfully grow a portion of their food on a limited budget. Many educators in New York State requested a similar, age-appropriate, curriculum for youth, which is how this curriculum came to be.