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• Invite your school gardeners to hold a salad luncheon in the garden featuring items from their hard-won harvest.
• Create a vegetable-of-the-week celebration. This could include a student-designed cafeteria display (or presentation) featuring information on that week’s edible, its nutrients, and the farmer or school gardeners who grew it. Try to include taste-tests and recipes to take home!
• Set up collaborative cooking in which mixed grade-level groups make and share dishes from homegrown foods.
• Host a local foods dinner and invite families and community members to attend. Prepare menus or brochures that explain the origins of the foods and make the case for eating locally.
• Have a festival that focuses on just one crop that’s important to the local or state economy. (See photos of a school Corn Festival in California.) When students research which food crops are important to their region or state, they may find an existing festival; if not, they can start one!
• Plan a community harvest festival on school grounds. It can feature garden tours, cooking demonstrations, performances, agricultural exhibits, games, and more. (See Tips on Creating a Community Harvest Festival.)

• To celebrate our hard work and the rewards of our harvest
• To eat an entire meal made from garden foods or foods that were grown in our area
• To celebrate part of our harvest in the tradition of another culture or ethnic group
• To help the entire school and community appreciate the importance of locally grown or produced foods
• To build awareness and enable people to try healthful foods
• To create school, farm, and home connections
• To showcase foods from local farms or the school garden in the cafeteria

• Invite festival guests to sample a variety of garden goods or student- and parent-prepared dishes. Also consider asking local chefs and farmers to prepare foods or to work with students on doing so. School events have featured such items as corn chowder, tomato and basil salad, zucchini fritters, squash muffins, homemade apple cider and sauce, salsa, pumpkin seed snacks, and even stone soup.
• Feature garden foods and dishes associated with the ethnic and cultural groups represented in the school and community. Learn about related harvest stories or traditions and invite festival visitors to participate.
• Decorate your festival location with natural harvest-themed materials. Here are some examples: table centerpieces representing different harvest items (e.g., pumpkins and gourds), corn sheaves, woven grapevines, or straw bales for seating
• Have students lead garden tours – complete with signs or brochures – and invite visitors to sample the fare while they explore and learn from your experts.
• Showcase community food resources. Ask local farmers, food producers (e.g., a cheesemaker), and others involved with fresh, healthful foods (chefs, nutritionists) to set up tables or booths.
• Set up activity stations to engage your audience. Consider the following:
  • Create a taste-testing table of garden edibles. Students may want their audience – in addition to tasting – to compare varieties or compare garden edibles with their storebought counterparts.
  • Set up a cooking area. You can engage visitors in activities such as making stone soup, pressing apples into cider, or grinding corn for tortillas or johnnycakes.
  • Involve visitors in harvest-related games (e.g., counting seeds in a pumpkin) or crafts (making cornhusk dolls or potato prints).
  • Set up a reading or storytelling area. Read books like The Enormous Turnip or invite a local storyteller to tell harvest-related tales.
• Create a harvest-based performance to share with visitors. This might be a garden-inspired play, skit, dance, or poetry reading relating to the harvest at hand, local agricultural harvests, or a traditional harvest tale from another culture.
• Have a harvest-themed art display. Consider auctioning or selling some pieces to raise money for your growing project. (See Bringing Art to Life in Schoolyards.)
• Publish a harvest cookbook. Consider putting together a print or online cookbook that features recipes representing your school’s garden harvest or those of gardeners in the community. Students can sell copies at the harvest festival to raise money for future growing or cooking projects.
  
  Have the class brainstorm how they might want to organize their book. Recipes could be organized by garden vegetable, meal course (e.g., salads, main dishes), or regional or ethnic group. Students can find recipes through cookbooks, families, local nutritionists, or online sources. Next, discuss what categories of information to include with each recipe, such as the name of the dish, cultural origin, nutritional value, ingredients, and how to prepare and eat it. Consider incorporating original drawings or photos. If you are using a cultural focus, send your class to these sites for inspiration: Global Gourmet Multicultural Cookbook, created by Australian students, or the international Multicultural Recipe Book.