The Zurich municipal council wants to enable more Zurich children to plant their own beds in school gardens. A traditional Zurich institution is back in fashion.
What’s growing there? Children learn a lot while working in the school garden.
For more than a hundred years, the city of Zurich has wanted to bring gardening closer to schoolchildren. It is a “both traditional and cutting-edge topic,” said Isabel Garcia (glp), who, together with Sebastian Vogel (fdp.), had suggested promoting gardening in school gardens, in the municipal council. At the moment, around two percent of the children are taking part in appropriate courses that are financially supported by the city. The postulants believe that this percentage should be increased again.
The love of the ground
In 1911 the Society for School Gardens began its work. Originally, she wanted to fetch the children from the streets and make them “enjoy their work and love their homeland,” as the statutes of 1913 put it. Today it’s more about showing the city kids that radishes don’t grow in Migros. Around 650 schoolchildren currently cultivate a bed in one of the 23 gardens every year, supervised by experts. The courses are popular and demand far exceeds supply.
With the school gardens, you can bring the subject of nature and the environment closer to the children and young people, they get to know and appreciate the seasonal fruits and vegetables, and gardening is also a useful leisure activity, said Isabel Garcia in the municipal council. Nobody wanted to object to that: With 110 to 0 votes, the council referred the postulate to the city council for examination.
The school garden is not a school garden
The postulate of Selina Walgis and Balz Bürgisser (both Greens) pointed in a similar direction: They wanted to ensure that school gardens were included in the planning of new school buildings from the outset. In contrast to student gardens, school gardens are the responsibility of the respective school and are managed by the classes.
But these are also supposed to do a lot of good things: The children learned to take responsibility and be patient, said Walgis. Only the SVP said no, because there simply isn’t room for everything around the school buildings. Nevertheless, the result was a clear yes with 94 to 16 votes.