We have started our Farm2School smoothie story with the purchase of two high quality blenders and serving containers. Our students just recently made and served our first batches of smoothies! It was exciting to blend, test, and adjust to come up with just the right smoothie blend.

Our school garden currently has strawberry, blueberry, and raspberry plants in it and one of the things we have long hoped to implement was a smoothie bar. Our strawberries are ripe now and students have been busy picking, washing and hulling the berries. We add all the stems and hulls to our school compost bins. Our first smoothies were strawberry-banana and they were a huge hit with our grade twelve students. We decided to serve the graduating students first because we are almost at the end of the school year and wanted them to be able to experience this before they leave the school. We will be trying different blends with our berry crops as they ripen, and we are freezing the fruit to continue serving smoothies to our students into the fall. Our plan is to serve one or two classrooms each week, which would mean that about 50 students each week would be getting a fresh fruit smoothie. It is extremely satisfying to know that we are able to provide local, organic, fresh fruit to our students!  Several students commented on how delicious the smoothies were.

Another part of our Farm2School project is the construction of a large greenhouse within our garden grounds. This hasn’t started yet, but we have people lined up to begin working this summer. Once that is finished, we will be growing tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers to provide a veggie bar for our students throughout the fall and winter months.  This will operate in much the same format as our smoothie bar, with students prepping the vegetables and serving one to two classes each week during the late fall and winter months.