Brooksfield School is a private Montessori school established in 1987, located in McLean, Virginia. The Brooksfield School is dedicated to providing a loving, stimulating and creative environment with a focus on the arts. They strive to nurture the social, physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual development of all students.
Gardening is a unique and exciting part of the upper school curriculum, and as a special treat to the students, Brooksfield School brought in Chef Tom Elder of Härth Restaurant at the Hilton McLean Tysons Corner. 

Härth focuses on seasonal and locally sourced ingredients, supporting farmers in the region. More specifically, Chef Tom keeps four beehives on the roof, that produced hundreds of pounds of honey used in the restaurant. The bees also help to pollinate his organic herb garden, where he grows other ingredients for the restaurant.



Chef Tom came to Brooksfield School to talk about bees and how important the pollination process is for growing foods in the garden. This was really special for the kids, since they are learning about the benefits of eating farm-to-table!




Barb Davis is an Upper School teacher and gardener at Brooksfield School, and had a ton of great information about the project!
"We are in our 3rd year of organic gardening as part of our curriculum. We have always done flower planting in the Fall and Spring but expanded to growing vegetables and herbs as well as composting as part of the recent trend to go green in all aspects of our daily existence."


She went on to explain, "Learning about gardening, particularly organic gardening, is important for the children because it gives them a stronger physical connection to, and subsequent respect for, the earth and the many living organisms and habitats that are dependent on something so ordinary as soil and all the simple but necessary ingredients that make it able to do something so profound as sustaining life. There are many things I would hope for the children to come away with in learning to garden--that's it's hard but fruitful work (pun intended), that growing food is an honorable task because it requires commitment, perseverance, and a lot of science smarts, that in experiencing how much work it takes to grow your own food you will be mindful of not wasting any of it and more likely to prepare it creatively."


"We work hard each year to grow our garden from many different types of vegetable seeds that we start indoors in the early spring. It would be great to have a small greenhouse in which to do this. We currently practice square foot gardening to maximize our yield in large planter boxes, but we're hoping to have a dedicated garden plot that will allow us to grow a greater variety of vegetables and berries earlier in the spring and into the fall."
Brooksfield School also includes outdoor adventures, like outdoor cooking, pitching tents, and paddling canoes, as a part of their campus life.