TA News

In Vermont’s winter season, many of us spend time reflecting on our last year and planning the year ahead. On campus, we are doing this too, thinking about our year in the garden and taking stock of how we’re doing in our farm-to-school programming. 

Even amidst the chaos and excitement of a big potato harvest or long work day, I try to capture tangible metrics like pounds of veggies harvested or the volume of food scraps we’ve diverted from the landfill. After some end-of-season number crunching, I’m happy to report the following outputs. 

In the fall semester, Thetford Academy harvested over 500 pounds of food from our gardens. Most of this was used to make delicious recipes in our Culinary Arts classroom with Cooking for Health and Foods Around the World students. Some of it was transformed into squash soups, apple crisps, and more for our local food shelf. 

We also collected food scraps from the Café on a weekly basis, rescuing approximately 900 lbs. of food that would otherwise be headed to a nearby landfill. This might seem like a lot, but we have actually reduced our food waste from previous years. 

Thanks to the bustle of the Design/Technology shop, we are able to collect carbon-rich wood shavings and maintain on-site sourcing of all of our compost ‘feedstocks’ for our nutrient cycling system. All of these ingredients are combined in our compost shed that the Timber Framing class built in 2022. Just this last spring, we were able to apply our first batch of school-made compost onto our garden beds during our annual Operation Day’s Work service-learning event. 

Here at TA, we don’t just measure our successes in pounds of food grown or gallons of food scraps collected, but we also see the impact in the smiles and laughter of our students as they experience the world through the lens of our garden. Our students experience the value of planting seeds in a sunny and warm greenhouse on a cold February day and smelling the hope of springtime in freshly prepared garden soil. 

In 2025, we strive to grow this momentum of physical, ecological, and emotional well-being for everyone as we build garden and farm-to-school opportunities here at TA. Happy New Year!