buzz: Waste Not, Want Not

Oliver and Grayson making cookies at The Fernwood Community Centre. Photo by Kari-Anne Chobotuck.

Tales of food from the Fernwood Community Centre Daycare

Imagine a room full of children under five at lunch time. Yes, they are practicing their independent eating skills. For the most part, with some encouragement, they do a great job. The floor tells a tale of what each child had in their lunches that day. Pasta, rice, fruits and veggies with the occasional blobs of yogurt and apple sauce strewn about.

The unfortunate by-product of this independence is a lot food waste. We’re recycling our paper and plastics but what about our garbage’s full of food?

We realized that we needed to change. We started with a bucket for food waste at each of the children’s tables and then, by chance, one of the staff found some compost bins for us. We were able to have small bins for each room. This was especially great for the infant room which you can imagine after meals is  more like navigating a mine field.  After a few days we realized that by composting we had cut our garbage in half. We started making better choices about composting but we needed more education about what happens to our food while it is composting.

We are fortunate to have The Compost Education Centre close to our daycare. I met with Compost Educator Clare who explained all the different courses available through their centre. We decided that the Wrigglers Series would be the most beneficial for our children. This series consisted of caring for and making a Worm Compost Bin to keep inside our centre. It so popular that the children can hardly contain themselves when it is their turn to feed the worms.

The children became very interested in food so at the next staff meetings we talked about Fernwood’s food programs and the direction of these programs. We decided that it would be great to include the children in the prep of some of the meals. We created a buddy systems where we have eight three to fives and eight toddlers working together. We planned out a few simple recipes and got started. To our delight the children enjoyed our cooking adventures and began to remind the teachers if we left out an ingredient. We explored the smells and taste of each ingredient and of course the chocolate chips and sugar were never forgotten. Soon our Fabulous Fernwood Foodies were making blueberry muffins, Coco Energy orbs, Cowboy cookies, biscuits, mini pizzas and pretzels. We are working up to making our own hot lunches for Mondays.

Staff recently took a workshop on container gardening with Mathew from The Life Cycles Project which made us all very excited about soil and food. In August we will be taking the second part of the Wrigglers Series and will learn how to harvest the black gold. Now that we will have soil and a cooking program we want to provide our children with healthy and natural food from our own gardens and provide great educational experience for our children, families and staff.

We hope that by instilling love for nurturing and growing food we will see the children, families and staff nurturing each other and helping each other grow as a community.

This year at FernFest we will be selling a variety of culinary herb plants from our local Ravenhill Farms to help raise funds for our garden projects.

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