By GARLAND KENNEDY
Daily Sitka Sentinel Staff Writer
Harvesting vegetables that grew over the summer, students at Pacific High opened the school year Tuesday with a hands-on lesson in both gardening and collaboration at the garden plot behind the Lincoln Street school.
At Pacific High, students can enroll in gardening or culinary classes, but the entire student body of about 40 teenagers was on hand Tuesday gathering the vegetables that will be incorporated into school meals, PHS teacher Mandy Summer said.
“This is a stewardship day – at the beginning of each school year we do what’s called orientation,” Summer said. “This is a six-day orientation. Sometimes it’s two weeks, but it is all stewardship projects, outdoor activities, community building activities to get students to know each other, to get to know staff. It really breaks down those barriers before we start in the academic classes.”
Formerly Pacific High’s principal, Summer now teaches culinary classes and works with meal preparation both at PHS and nearby Xoots Elementary.
Over the past decade, Pacific High’s farm-to-table program has grown from humble beginnings, Summer said.
“About 12 years ago, we had one raised bed, and it was in the front of the building, on a grassy lawn, because that’s what the front was before our school was remodeled and the landscaping was put out there,” she said. “We had a ‘reading and weeding’ class… Garden plants were the theme of the class, and kids practiced different kinds of reading strategies by becoming the expert in that garden plant. So that’s really how we started incorporating gardening into the curriculum. And kids became very excited about watching their seeds grow and taking recordings of them and writing about them.”
“In 2015 we had the one raised bed, we built maybe three or four more,” she continued. “And over the years, we built another two, another three, another four. Then we got a grant, a partnership grant, with Sitka Tribe of Alaska that provided the funding to purchase the greenhouse.”
The school greenhouse, completed in 2023, is now in its first fully operational year and is brimming with plants. Near the greenhouse are a number of raised beds and a fenced garden with fruit trees.
Andrea Fraga, who grows produce full time at Middle Island Gardens, is the school’s garden coordinator. At the orientation Tuesday she instructed students in proper techniques, from digging potatoes to cleaning garlic. She first began working with the school in 2021 under a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant, and now holds the position thanks to a state Department of Natural Resources Specialty Crop Block Grant secured by the Sitka Conservation Society.
“We’re doing a big harvest. We’ve got garlic and shallots today,” Fraga said. “In the greenhouse, folks are harvesting tomatoes, zucchini, bush beans, we have some mint in there. Outdoors here we have some cabbage and kale harvested, chives.”
Part of the DNR grant, she said, is to examine “what can grow here. What does it actually look like to grow radish or carrot – and self-sufficiency.”
Students gain a sense of place and pride in their work through the gardening class, Fraga said, and can eat the products of their labor at the end.
“I try to align production with the school year, but then we have things like lettuce and tomatoes in the summer,” the teacher said. “We have a fair amount of volunteers, so they get to eat what’s available in the summer… I’ve been growing produce for years on Middle Island, but I thought it’d be neat to try to teach younger generations how to do it as well, because Sitka really needs that.”
PHS junior TJ Vaughn-Jeske has enjoyed seeing the garden develop and expand in his years at Pacific High.
“The amazing harvest — there’s always a lot of vegetables and stuff to pick. A lot of new varieties this year,” he said. “Overall, I’m learning how to sustain myself and grow my own plants, in case I ever wanted to start a farm or garden. When I first got here, we didn’t have that big greenhouse or much of this at all either,” the junior said, gesturing at a series of raised gardening beds. “We used to only have cabbage, garlic and a few others. That’s really how much it changed.”
His favorite aspect of the school and its gardening program is “definitely the people, the community that we bring together to pick everything… Just an amazing place in general. The community is super nice, everyone knows each other.”
Hard at work cleaning fresh-picked garlic was freshman Skip Votaw.
“We’re just learning how to process fresh food out of the garden, cook it,” he said. “It’s healthier than normal school food. This is fresh from a garden turning into our lunch.”
He plans to continue his education with the school’s gardening and culinary classes, and appreciates that PHS offers such a comprehensive gardening program.
“We have the best food system in all of Southeast Alaska for school lunches,” he said.
PHS senior Katie Elder enjoys the gardening program, and has watched the garden grow dramatically through the years.
“I’ve been here since I was a sophomore, so I’ve only had a few years’ experience here, and when I first got here, we didn’t have the greenhouse,” she said. “It’s been really nice to have through the summer and up until now even. And I loved helping with the plant sale in the beginning of spring. That was quite a bit of fun. We ended up making quite a bit for our garden program,” Elder said.
“My favorite one to grow probably is cabbages, because they get so much bigger and denser than what you can buy in the store, or tomatoes, because fresh tomatoes are way better than store-bought ones,” she said. As a side project, Elder is working with edible mushrooms such as blue and pink oysters and lion’s mane.
Pacific High’s gardening program has become a model for others, Mandy Summer said.
“We have groups that come in and they want to see what Pacific High School is doing with this farm and food program, because it’s so unique,” the teacher said. “And a lot of other schools have tried small gardens or doing their own food, but I mean, we’re really doing it on what’s becoming a much larger scale. And so it’s just really exciting to see that other people are coming to learn from us as well.”
Sitka Local Foods Network 
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