If you’ve ever sat outside for lunch, chances are you’ve noticed the small garden off in the corner. If you weren’t paying attention, though, you might not have seen it. “It’s pretty small…” said Brandon Fox ‘16. Despite the garden’s small size, quite a bit of effort went into completing it.

Officially, the garden was completed in spring 2015, but it started when Milton Robinson, a Special Education coordinator, built the blue frames with his summer school program in 2014. The following spring, Candice Hancock, Family and Consumer Science teacher, with her Foods class and TC Evans’ Life Skills class, began planting green beans and spinach.

“The [Life Skills] class maintains the garden. They plant, water, weed, and harvest,” says Hancock “[This]was done to introduce organic farming to the HB Community.”

“I had a lot of fun,” said Life Skills student Eastman Chandler ‘15, “I think it will be a big wake up call to people that we don’t need the additives in our food.” There are no pesticides included in the HB Garden.

The Foods and Life Skills classes were not alone in their project. Joining them was Ron Christie, owner of Living Earth Farm in Brookline.

“I do a lot of school garden works at University of New Hampshire,” he said. Christie does garden work all around New Hampshire, and said that “it was fun to work in the community I live in.” With his help, the HB garden has added high tunnels over the garden beds, which will allow students to harvest vegetables through the winter and keep animals out.

The Foods and Life Skills classes are harvesting spinach in the winter and are planning on planting pumpkins in the spring.

Ron Christie is the owner of Living Earth Farm in Brookline, NH. All food on the farm is grown without the use of pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides.

Learn more about Living Earth Farm at www.livingearthfarmer.com