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A bountiful harvest for Riverside School

Sep 16, 2011 | 5:23 PM

A group of Grade 8 students spent the afternoon pulling beets, carrots and potatoes from the ground.

They were from Riverside Community School and were harvesting their annual vegetable crop. It’s a program the school has had for years, the last three of which have been in partnership the Provincial Correctional Center.

The vegetables that didn’t get eaten while the kids worked will all go back to Riverside School where they will be used in the snack program.

“The (students) get an appreciation for things growing naturally and where food actually comes from. A lot of people don’t ever really have an awareness of that,” said Kim Jones, vice principal at Riverside.

“It means we can get our kids out here in the community. We are a community school so we want our kids out in the community, learning to be helpful and to contribute.”

It was a lesson that Dominique Gareau will take home.

“I learned how to unroot a beet … and how to pull stuff out correctly and I am actually learning that you cannot have fruits or vegetables or whatever around maggots,” she said with a laugh.

The students spent about an hour and a half pulling vegetables, resulting in several bins filled with their hard work.

For student Cheyenne Bird-Charles, it was second nature.

He said gardening is nothing new to him, but it does take a little bit of muscle.

“You have to have some power to get the carrots out,” he said, while snickering at a classmate.

While the students get to reap the rewards, members of the Community Training Residence planted the garden in the spring and they, along with some young offenders, kept it weeded throughout the summer, said Jerry Jarvis, with the Provincial Correctional Centre.

Corrections and Riverside have been partners for 14 years, even though this project is still fairly new.
Jarvis said everything harvested goes to the school.

“They make soups and whatever they need to do and usually, from what I understand, is that 200 litres of soup a month are given out,” he said.

The garden that was harvested is 5,000 square feet in size and Jarvis said they plan to at least double its size next year. He added all the seeds used were donated by John’s Garden Centre, one more way the community came together.

Looking around Gareau realized how much work everyone put in to make the garden a reality.

“It’s really fun, and there are lot of people putting work in to this and a lot of people who care about our community,” she said.

klavoie@panow.com