8. Harvesting and cooking

By the end of this unit, you will enable children to:

1. Recognise what and when a crop is ready for harvesting, by considering the season and crop development
2. Harvest, discuss and share favourite vegetables
3. Revisit knowledge and expectations about growth
4. Assess factors for growth or lack of growth/death of plants
5. Involve the community in aspects of harvest celebration
6. Collect, read, and prepare recipes
7. Help prepare and cook vegetables for eating
8. Write comments about the prepared/ cooked food
9. Write blogs and newsletters
10. Plan for continued watering and harvesting during the holidays

A simple table can be devised to record the weight of each harvest.

Through verbal descriptions and physical handling, children can pay attention to the appearance of produce. Is the external skin lucid/shiny or opaque? What about the thickness of the skin?

The observation and study of the produce can lead to questions and discussion about:

• Why have some managed to grow to full-size where others may not have?
• Have any diseases affected the crops?
• Have certain conditions helped with exceptional growth?

Children may wish to research what is the biggest vegetable ever produced, or find out about vegetable exhibitions in parks and garden centres.

• H is for Harvest - Fun Kids - the UK's children's radio station (funkidslive.com)

In class, children can discuss favourite dishes and find out about the ingredients. Each child can take home some of their favourite vegetables to share with their family.

Parents can get involved in harvesting by sharing recipes or ideas for cooking particular vegetables. Each child may be given the task of collecting a recipe from home to share in the school.

In class, children may be engaged in writing a blog or a newsletter about the harvest, and to publish some of the recipes they have collected.

With the help of the headteacher the school may organise an end-of-year picnic to invite parents to visit the garden, pick some vegetables and enjoy some of the cooking.

A group needs to be created to maintain the garden and to help with the later harvests - for example harvesting continues after summer with the late potatoes… through to Halloween!

• Eat the Seasons

Children can gather information on what is available in local supermarkets and compare with a Scottish crop calendar to see where the supermarket varieties come from. Teachers can use this to engage in discussion around why these differences occur (climate, sun) and how the crops and fruits come to our supermarkets. Discussing transport of foods leads to ideas around energy use, pollution and sustainability.

If you can enlist the help of the school canteen staff, it may be possible to use the crops harvested from the garden to prepare a small meal for children and parents.

If the canteen staff, or suitably experienced external people from the community, are willing, it may be possible to take small groups of children at a time to prepare simple meals in the school canteen, or kitchen, if available.

As “homework,” children can take the crops home and, with the help of their parents, prepare the food for their family and write a report about how they found it. Recipes or the grown produce can be sold at a small price to increase revenues for the garden; but vegetables can also be used for art work and fancy displays.

Using their five senses of taste, touch, smell, hearing and sight, children can explore the different properties of vegetables, foods and spices. With sufficient practice, children will be able to develop these senses and learn to appreciate the different qualities of foods and how they can be used in food preparation.

After harvesting and cleaning crops that can be eaten raw, such as lettuce, radish, carrot, rocket, the classroom can be turned into a taste appreciation restaurant. Children can sample each of the crops; feel the crunch, taste the flavour, and be asked to write a sentence about each of them.

Children can also give a score out of 10 for each of the crops they have tasted. The class can then discuss their experiences and whether they have tasted these crops before. They can also discuss why different people experience tastes in different ways, and what types of foods are healthy and why they are important nutritionally.

• Eatwell Guide - Food and nutrition | NHS inform