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Memories grown in a Waldorf school garden

May 16, 2016

Nine-year-olds wielding scythes working side by side in a wheat field. Third-graders harnessed eight at a time to a wooden plow, like oxen. Grade-schoolers making sachets of dried blood to ward off deer, and burying animal horns in the earth to feed the soil. These are some of the memories my daughters have of their time as students at the Waldorf School of Princeton. My daughters are now in their 30s, and since their school days the number and popularity of school gardens have exploded. The National Farm to School Network reports that 40,000 schools in the United States now have a school garden, where they facilitate learning everything from basic math skills to nutrition. Without question, the gardening program at the Waldorf School of Princeton—and, indeed, at Waldorf schools worldwide—is one of the most intensive, and I’m grateful my children got to participate in it. If my daughters and their classmates are any example, lessons learned in a school garden can create a lasting impression. My daughter Alice still can’t shake the experience of making those god-awful-smelling little sachets to tie onto the fence to keep deer out of the garden. Her sister Elizabeth was convinced, as a third-grader, that she was involved in witchcraft. “We concocted a biodynamic potion, stuffed it into some type of animal horn and buried it underground,” Elizabeth says. “After a moon cycle we took it out and used it to fertilize something.” (Not only have such biodynamic processes gained wider acceptance in recent years, especially in wine grape viticulture, but scientific studies have also found that biodynamic agriculture results in less-stressed soils and marked improvements in diversity of soil microflora and fauna.) It’s quite possible that Elizabeth’s concern about the dark arts may have been further aroused when later the class made their own brooms after cutting down broom corn from the school garden. More »