Heather Howell Transcript

Hello, my name is Heather Howell. I am a high school teacher here in the Burlington community at a high school called Emma Robinson High School and I work together with a special program within the Halton District School Board called the Community Pathways program. This program is an educational program for students with disabilities both neurodivergent students as well as other students with other developmental disabilities. My students in this program have been involved in our our horiculture heritage garden project. It's a project that we started a few years ago in collaboration together with the museums of Burlington.

My students ended up coming up to the Ireland House Museum that we see behind us. And the Ireland family were one of our early settler families to the Burlington community and they built their homestead back in the 1837. My students when they came up into this area, they were, you know, we were just kind of visiting the property, but we noticed that the garden next to the homestead needed a little bit of, you know, tender care. And since my students are actually involved in a course called horticulture therapy, we decided we can work together and we can help out the museums of Burlington with their kitchen garden. And so that's what we did. So with our project, we are involved with both the growing to the harvesting and the preservation of food. My students are learning about historical methods where they're actually in terms of growing the food. 

So they're going to be learning, you know, how you're actually going to be fertilizing the garden using, you know, some of the animal manures that the families would be having in the past and they would also be doing kind of traditional methods. So for instance, watering the garden all by hand using the water that we've collected from the rain barrels. We also work together with the museums of Burlington to learn about food preservation.