The Leelanau School Greenhouse
Growing Our Food
We believe at the Leelanau School, that knowing how to feed oneself in a healthy, satisfying, and sustainable way is an important life skill. The Leelanau School’s greenhouse and food gardens provide an exciting hands-on environment for students to experience and understand where food comes from and how it is grown. We grow a variety of organic herbs, vegetables, and flowers for the school’s dining hall and grounds and create opportunities for classes and individual students to get up close and personal with food growing.Through the greenhouse program, education in the dining hall and around campus, students are encouraged to think about where their food comes from and have awareness of what is going into their bodies. Students start off the year harvesting potatoes from the garden to take on their exploratory trips!
Leelanau School Greenhouse Class
Everyone has the opportunity to get involved in the school greenhouse, but this class takes students deeper in a discovery of food systems, sustainability, and farm-to-table. Students participate in the growing, harvesting, processing, and even cooking of food from the garden. They also help care for our campus chickens and the Composting Program. In this class students think deeply about the food systems that supply their diets and the world.They are asked to pay attention to what they eat and discover their own personal food philosophies. We use the thriving local agricultural of Leelanau County as an extension of our classroom. Students visit local farms and CSA’s, creameries, orchards and more!
Composting
Reducing waste is incredibly important at the Leelanau School. We treasure the natural environment that surrounds our campus and want to pass on it’s stewardship to the next generation. We compost 100% of our kitchen waste and also have composting programs in the residence houses and academic buildings. Students see and participate in the composting process everyday. We want to show everyone how easy and beneficial composting can be. It truly is a magical way to reduce waste and rebuild the nutrients in the soil. The compost we make is added to the school’s gardens every year in the school greenhouse, providing an organic source of nutrients for the food we grow. Our food scraps are no longer waste and they never even leave our campus!