Students harvesting to feed the hungry

When you’re sitting down to dinner tonight, chances are the food on your plate is paid for instead of home grown. But this year a group of Niagara Catholic high school students has been eating food they’ve grown themselves. And today they were harvesting the food to feed the hungry.

These Niagara Catholic high school students are out of the classroom and into the farm fields, learning how to grow the food that ends up on their dinner plates.

Marco Magazzeni, Niagara Catholic School Board: “So it’s full circle. From planting, to picking to process to a final end usage.”

Sam Iftody has given them two acres of land on his Fenwick farm to grow anything they want: “Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, zucchini. They’re growing it all.”

And things a little more exotic, like these tomatillos: “There’s nothing better for making Salsa Verde than that.”

They started planting in May and come out every week to tend it.

Emily Parker, Notre Dame High School: “Because I enjoy gardening and everything.”

Being out on the farm is something city kids rarely experience. One teenager who was in the program last year decided after he’d been out in the fields that he wanted to become a farmer.

Sam Iftody: “Anything we’re growing. If they want to harvest corn they can go into the corn fields and pick corn. They won’t damage it. They’re very disciplined.”

Today they’re out picking tomatoes. One hundred, twenty bushels of tomatoes.

That they’ll turn into sauce, with the help of the ladies at Casa Dante Lodge.

Twenty-four hundred litres of sauce is what the students will be donating to the Project Share and Harvest Kitchen food banks.