Zawadi Land Stewardship, ON
Grant term, 2025-2026
This project builds on an ongoing partnership between Zawadi Connections and North Albion Collegiate Institute (NACI) that began in 2023. Together, we have worked with students and staff to expand the school’s growing spaces using ecological and sustainable gardening practices. Over the past three years, students have helped build vegetable gardens, establish a pollinator garden, improve soil through composting, and learn how healthy ecosystems support food production.
Each year, the growing space has expanded. In 2023, students planted garlic in their courtyard. During 2024 and 2025, they helped build vegetable gardens, grow vegetables, maintain the courtyard and plant a pollinator garden. The 2026 microgreens project and garden expansion has been the next step in this progression, allowing students to grow fresh food year-round using a method they can recreate at home.
The microgreens project focused on one Grade 10 Food and Nutrition students and the school gardening club. Students learned every step of the process by seeding, watering, monitoring, harvesting, and packaging their own microgreens. The class grew and harvested containers of fresh microgreens, seeding pea shoots and a salad mix, completing several growing cycles throughout the school year. After each harvest, the used soil and spent seeds were composted in the school’s courtyard garden, returning nutrients to the soil for future gardening. Students also helped install new garden beds where they planted culinary herbs, culturally relevant vegetables and herbs, and used new tools to maintain the garden space.
Because students were responsible for growing the crop from seed to harvest, they also had a say how it should be shared. Their teacher shared:
“Students voiced that they would like to use what they have grown to support their immediate families, as well as the NACI and broader-community in which we live.”
The harvests were shared in several ways. Students took containers home to their families, and some were added to NACI’s “Feed the Students” Initiative. The school’s pantry, which had previously offered mostly shelf-stable foods, can now also provide fresh produce grown by students for students.
When asked what was the most enjoyable part of the program one student shared “Harvesting the food was really cool, I felt like a farmer.”
The equipment purchased through SFIF will continue to support this work long after the grant has ended. The growing trays, shelving, lights, garden beds, indoor citrus trees, and maintenance supplies can be used year after year, allowing future classes and student clubs to keep growing fresh produce indoors and outdoors throughout the different seasons.
