MarinHEAL Grantees

The West Marin-Inverness Elementary School Garden features 32 raised garden beds, providing a space for students to learn hands-on food growing skills. The garden coordinator works as a liaison with the classroom teachers, ensuring students have two hours of instructed garden time, tending to the crops they will later harvest and eat each week. Additionally, the garden coordinator leads a cooking class for students, teaching them how to prepare the food they’ve grown themselves. In the warmer months, the garden has an abundance of Strawberries, tomatoes, and peppers. Winter bears green, thick, hardy plants including Cabbages, Broccoli, and Pineapple guavas. 

Beyond being a food-growing space, the garden serves as an enrichment activity area for students. Groups such as the Inverness Garden Clubs host an after-school gardening class once a week in the garden to provide extra opportunities for learning in the garden space. The site has also become a place for special art projects, such as cultivating, harvesting, and processing Indigo herbs for natural fabric drying process.

The garden program helps to increase the number of scratch-made meals served at the school. Kitchen staff coordinate meal plans with the garden team to incorporate produce grown into the school lunch program. This has been fostered by a unique model that has been formed through the distribution of MarinHEAL funding within neighboring gardening sites. A floating garden coordinator rotates between Nicasio Elementary, and West-Marin Inverness school to maintain success in both gardens.

The West Marin Elementary School Garden and Nicasio Elementary School Garden are part of a larger movement in West Marin to develop a regional school garden to cafeteria program, with the intention of expanding the amount of fresh, locally grown ingredients in school meals throughout West Marin.

The increased number of crops grown calls for additional renovation of the site’s infrastructure, with plans underway to upgrade the current processing table and sink into a functional outdoor kitchen, where kids can harvest and cook food in the garden itself. Additionally, a full system for tracking, processing, and harvesting has been implemented over the past year to help plan for future projects and continue upholding the success of the program.