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Flowers of labour...The hanging gardens of a Dubai school
Novel green project helps students learn about nature by giving them the opportunity to grow plants.
Students of GEMS Our Own Indian School, Al Quoz, examine the flowers they helped blossom; and (below) students watering some plants at the school. — KT photos by Rahul Gajjar
While walking through the corridor of the kindergarten section in the GEMS Our Own Indian School in Al Quoz, one can see rows of cartoons of fruits and vegetables made of colourful chart papers hanging from the ceiling.
A board placed on the side wall just below them has another image of a tree getting watered with a huge caption, “We Can Make A Difference”, running above it.
The cartoon veggies are a testimony of how the kindergarten students used to learn about fruits and vegetables earlier — through cutouts, images in books etc. Not anymore.
The school is now making a difference in the way the students learn about nature. Finding a way around the issue of limited space for gardening on the campus, the school has introduced vertical gardens and is expanding the greenery in many ways.
The result — young students get to grow fruits, vegetables and flowering plants by themselves. Once their efforts literally bear fruit, they get to eat them as well.
It was the school’s principal, Lalitha Suresh, who took the initiative to get the children closer to nature and give them a “firsthand experience of seeing the vegetables grow, flower, fruit and actually pluck them and eat”. And she borrowed the vertical garden concept in Dubai’s Miracle Garden for gardening in the limited space in the school campus. “I always wanted our children to learn about environment sustainability. Our children over here never get to see vegetables being grown fresh because most of them stay in flats,” Suresh tells Khaleej Times.
Excited kids
Young students are all excited about the different aspects of the school garden that is now spread across every nook and corner of the campus.
Abdulla bin Aboobaker, a KG2 student, is excited about watering the garden, plucking the fruits and eating them. “We washed them before eating because bacteria are there,” says bin Aboobaker.
Mahima Manoj Punjabi loves the flowers more. “There are rose flowers, pink flowers and yellow flowers ... I love watering the plants and seeing the happy flowers ... We pluck out the sad (withered) flowers,” says the grade one student.
Ritwik Mohan of the same grade now knows honey bees come to the garden and help make more plants and flowers while Hessah Sadath of grade 2 says, “We will get food only if we take care of vegetable plants.”
Home science student in grade 11, Mrinalini Jayakumar, is thrilled about another opportunity she and her classmates got because of the garden — of cooking the vegetables cultivated by the KG students and serving them to the latter.
“Our first experience was in mid-April. We made a vegetable salad and a leafy dish (of spinach) for them. It was an amazing experience. We want to do it again.”
Cecilia Gomes, a grade two teacher, says the students have become green champions in a few months. “They love gardening and it is helping them to get some sunlight for their bodies as well,” she says.
One-tree garden to a flourishing one
Apart from the only mulberry tree that the school used to have earlier, it now has a variety of vegetable plants — tomato, capsicum, beans, eggplant, cabbage, spinach, curry leaf, lady finger, green chilly, lettuce, and many other flowering plants.
“We have got more than 10kg of fruits and vegetables this year,” says senior admin officer S. Johnson. The school is now planning to add more blocks of vertical gardens using Coke bottles for growing small plants like mustard, fenugreek leaves, coriander leaves and also plant creepers like watermelon and pumpkin around the compound wall after removing the tiles around it. Classes will be divided to take care of different sections of the expanding gardens.
“We are also thinking of bringing in financial literacy when children sell these vegetables to teachers and staff members ... We will do that when we get more vegetables,” says the principal.
Most students say they do not have a garden at home and many have told their parents they want a vertical garden like the one in school. And that is exactly the message that the school is trying to spread through the green project.
sajila@khaleejtimes.com
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