Washington Academy

An independent secondary school educating students since 1792

Over the past two years, the Washington Academy Garden has had some amazing developments and strengthened many bonds with the local community as faculty, students join with community members to develop unique ways to collaborate through gardening and growing food.

The driving force behind the production and upkeep of the garden are the students who during the school year can enroll in a Sustainable Agriculture class for students grades 9 through 12. The students in this class were involved in everything the garden needed through the changing seasons: harvesting in early fall, mulching beds and cleaning tools before winter strikes, learning about soil health and plant characterization through the frozen winter months plus preparing all the beds and growing seedings as soon as spring came around.

Then during the summer this past year, Washington Academy hosted an international summer program where students from China, France, and Brazil all participated in caring for the garden. With a summer curriculum that was saturated in hands-on work experiences that taught students about the many jobs within the field of agriculture as well as the great outdoors, the students harvested seaweed, grew peas, leeks and onions, kale, beets, radishes, lettuce and garlic. The summer students maintained the garden over the summer, harvested and cleaned all the produce. They also made some fabulous salads for taste testing!

One of the community organizations the school garden supports is the Machias Area Food Pantry. Over the past two years, the school garden donated well over 2,000 lbs of organic, nutritious produce to the food pantry for local people and families in need. These school garden donations may have inspired the food pantry to start their own garden project to better serve the community. To get the project off the ground the food pantry obtained a soil donation from the Coast of Maine through their Growing Good program in coordination with their local hardware store, Pineo’s True Value Hardware.

Washington Academy has also been a host site to AmeriCorps and their efforts have enabled the school garden project to grow at a much faster rate and provided overall organization for the projects.

The Academy’s goal to connect students to their community, provide an active engagement learning space and develop skill sets that go far beyond a classroom using the Sustainable Agriculture class plus all the community partnerships have resulted in a very successful beginning.