Growing Wisdom
Learning How to Grow Plants - Wisely
Too often, I see children and adults, introduced to learning how to grow plants with an immediate coupling with growing vegetables, bypassing the important broader connections to our own landscape, environment, local food systems and culinary heritage.
Too often I see a disconnect between the food for sale at the supermarket and our actual ability to grow those plants in our immediate tropical lowland environment. With much of our food grown in cooler environments of Cameron Highlands and Genting or imported as part of an increasingly globalised food system what we can and should be growing are often not the same as what we see in the marketplace and assume can be grown easily.
Too often I’ve been asked to run programs teaching kids to plant seeds in recycled plastic bottles - I always refuse because I don’t want to perpetuate the ability of large corporations to create plastic bottle waste in full knowledge and understanding now that single use plastic is simply too inefficient and costly to be recycled.
Or to set up a school garden where children and even the teachers involved have little education in the eco literacy involved in understanding the broader connections mentioned earlier thus accelerating into the task of growing food without the informed choices that a better understanding of local food heritage and local environmental conditions would help translate into better, more sustainable and nutritious outcomes.
Learning how to grow things is an ancient transfer of knowledge that has allowed human beings to nourish themselves, fill gardens and landscapes with beauty and diversity that also creates material for arts and crafts and opportunity for wildlife to and natural landscape to thrive. It allows willing members of our communities to perhaps choose to scale that up to create farms and enterprises that can feed and nurture us whilst providing income and economic opportunity for themselves.
We want pass on this knowledge about growing plants not just for vegetables but as first principles also for growing medicines, flowers, orchards, trees for shade and more. We have thus developed a more holistic approach that broadens the notion of growing plants into a kind of growing wisdom.
Growing Wisdom Programs
- We teach the basics of how to grow things: soil preparation, propagation and encourage the grower to make their own choices on what to grow
- We provide context, pairing it with Eat Your Landscape
- We encourage discovery of variables to help make good choices - whether it be growing flowers, trees or vegetables.
- We explain best practises, and impacts - how our choices affect ourselves, our workers, neighbours and our environment.
- We shape the programs to suit the demographic of the attendees be they, children, adults, local, international students or expats
Edible Education
Growing Wisdom is a foundational program that is part of our broader curriculum for Edible Education connecting it to Eat your Landscape, Nourish and Kitchen Skills.
Upcoming Programs:
13 + 14 September: Growing Wisdom + Eat Your landscape
FOR CHILDREN 8-12 YRS OLD
Related
In our podcast, we discuss the related issues around Rethinking a Culture of Growing Things
Over on Johor Green there’s an article about lowland tropical greens that are nutritious and easy to grow
A Quick guide to Herbal Digestives & More:
