Eco-actions of Creating Pollinator Habitats for Sustainable Food

The content of "Growing of Vegetables" unit in the third-grade natural science textbook include the body structure of vegetables, planting techniques, and methods about taking care of vegetables. The natural science teacher designed and added the “core competence-based” learning of "organic gardening" to make children integrate knowledge, skills, and scientific attitudes into learning to practice the core competence. This is just the interest of “Learning by Doing” which Dr. Dewey said.

The more bees, the more harvest.

Eco-actions of Creating Pollinator Habitats for Sustainable Food

We always plant vegetables by an environmentally friendly idea because we are learning to coexist with the Nature. We don’t use chemical fertilizers and chemical pesticides in the vegetable garden. Although the output of crops cannot be compared with the amount of traditional farming method, it is for a long-term ecological balance. Helping protect environment, we can make sure getting the sustainable food. The gardening procedures include 6 steps: site preparation, fertilization, sowing, watering, pest prevention and harvest.

Planting vegetables by organic ways.

Children discussed some ways about non-toxic insect control and prevention with their natural science teacher, and they carried out these methods by inquiry-based experiment. Children wanted to know: Which insect control and prevention method is the most effective? They experimented with several methods, including sprinkling homemade chili pepper water, or coffee grounds, constructing prevention nets and growing some shallots which’s smell could prevent insects. Of course, they also reserved a ridge of vegetables without any measures.

The vegetable garden is full of insects.

Because we never use the pesticide and herbicides on campus, we must weed by hand. While removing the weeds, the children observed various insects in the garden at the same time. The vegetable garden is full of butterflies (and their larvae), beetles, grasshoppers, bees, wasps, etc. When we noticed that non-toxic campus could attract more insects coming, children grew more flowering plants to supply more food for bees and butterflies. Then more and more insects appeared on the campus.

The more wasps, the less caterpillars.

We also noticed there are many honeybees around the world disappeared because of the pesticide. This is a big problem to farming because honeybees are always pollinating for flowering plants. But, according to some researches, many solitary bees are backup for honeybees because they provide the pollination insurance like the honeybees, too. Therefore, we collected children and parents to design and make some solitary bee houses/hotels and hanged them on our campus. These bee houses attracted some kinds of bees or wasps coming to build nests for breeding. Those female potter wasps always hunt numerous larvae of moths, which are harmful to vegetables, to feed their larvae.

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In summary, we expanded the curriculum core from “Sustainable Food” to the “Biodiversity”. The Eco-actions of creating pollinator habitats we have implemented contained organic gardening, growing flowering plants and supplying solitary bee houses. The curriculum benefits for children include:

1. Enhancing children's core competence of scientific inquiry.
2. Children practicing Cross-disciplinary learning and learning problem-solving skills.
3. Children understanding the relationship between the bees/wasps and vegetables.
4. Guiding parents to concern and participate the Eco-action for Biodiversity.

Feedback and comments

Ching-Hung HSU (2019). Eco-actions of creating pollinator habitats for sustainable food. 2019 CSEE 29th International Conference on Environmental Education Academia and Practices, Hualien County (September 27~29, 2019).