CHS October Meeting: Learning Lessons from the Youth

This year our Youth Challenge Eco Garden Club focus was entitled Grow Your Own Dinner. Join us on October 26th to discover the secret ingredients of natural nourishment in creative learning spaces led by our Youth Challenge gardeners.
Our youth members asked for a season focussed on growing food in the native gardens they had been nurturing for a few years. Grow Your Own Food – Discover the secret ingredients of natural nourishment took off with winter sowing workshop in Buzzing Bees’ innovative growing dome. Using a makerspace styled learning format, youth were given essential instructions that were followed up with hands-on learning. The youth learned how to use their senses to discover how to engage in the energy flow, also known as the nutrient flow, in the ecosystem of their garden. For the rest of the season, the youth practiced OWLing (Observe, Wonder & Learn) by tracing the affects of the sun, water, and micronutrients in their gardens and nature journals.
The youth club had fun teaching other young people at the Georgina-Brock Garden Clubs’ Seedy Saturday Winter Sowing Workshop held in March 2026. While we waited for the snow to melt, the YC busied themselves learning how to draw plants better with our local artist and club chair, Marg Munro and then figured out how to plan their gardens by paying attention to sun, water, and microbe energy flows. Mid spring, Trusty trail guides introduced us to life on the Carden Alvar as we hiked through swaths of Prairie Smoke and past hidden Lady Slipper colonies. A summer lesson in thermal composting boosted our knowledge of the soil’s food web and how we need to support the living soil in our own gardens. Our youth lead taught us about carbon and nitrogen compost building, measuring heat cycles, and how to use the hand test to measure moisture content. A bonus bee keeping introduction was a perfect reminder for us to build capacity for greater biodiversity in our own gardens.
This growing season has been scribbled and sketched into nature journals and followed up with garden tours, self-evaluations, and external adjudication. The YC plan on celebrating their learning and growing with some corn maze fun and seed swapping in September.
Come and share with us at our October 26th Awards night where we will lead you through our own makerspace-styled centers and acknowledge our progressive learning in an awards’ presentations. We will be starting at 7pm in order to accomodate the younger presenters in the group. Please join us and celebrate with our young gardeners – they are the future of our club.
​
October Flower/Vegetable & Culinary Show
All members are invited to bring in their garden treasures to wow the judge! All entries to be in place by 7pm for the start of judging. Doors open at 6:30pm.