Our story is written in schoolyards.
Schoolyard Roots grew up in Tuscaloosa elementary schools — in raised beds, tasting tables, and weekly lessons that make science, food, and friendship something you can hold in your hands.
Schoolyard Roots cultivates curiosity and connections through hands-on learning gardens. We engage communities with food and nature to inspire, delight, and bring classroom concepts to life.
We did not begin as a brand. We began as people who believed Alabama children deserve a place outdoors, at school, where a seed can become a lesson — and a lesson can become a habit of care.
How we started
University of Alabama students have been part of this work since 2010: tending beds, building compost systems, selling produce, putting up a greenhouse and packing shed, writing recipes, teaching, and showing up for fundraising nights. That campus-to-schoolyard pipeline is still in the soil of the organization.
In 2012 the work took the shape the city now knows as Gardens 2 Schools. Staff and Garden Educators began weekly, standards-based lessons in Tuscaloosa-area elementary gardens. Students planted, measured, harvested, and tasted food they had grown themselves.
We were called Druid City Garden Project then — a name that belonged to Tuscaloosa’s nickname and to a small nonprofit trying to build healthier communities through food.
What grew
The gardens multiplied. So did the idea of what a school garden could hold.
Teachers asked for lessons that matched Alabama’s Course of Study. We built a K–5 curriculum that puts science, math, reading, writing, social studies, health, and the arts in the same bed. Students learned to run farm stands. Cooking and tasting days turned harvest into something you could smell down the hallway. Schools used the gardens not only as labs, but as a quiet outdoor place to reset during the day.
For a time the work also included a garden at the Tuscaloosa County Juvenile Detention Center — a smaller, quieter plot where growing food and taking care of something living were part of the day.
Through it all the through-line stayed simple: children learn best when they can see, smell, taste, touch, and hear the lesson.
A name that fits the work
In July 2017, we changed our name from Druid City Garden Project to Schoolyard Roots.
The gardens were never only a city project. They were — and are — schoolyards: twelve of them now, in Tuscaloosa City Schools and the Tuscaloosa County School System, with more than 4,700 students in kindergarten through fifth grade walking out to the beds each year.
The name marks that shift. The mission did not.
We still believe:
Schoolyard Roots builds community through food. By increasing access to fresh, locally grown produce, we empower our community to make healthy and sustainable food choices.
Someday, every school in Alabama will have a teaching garden.
A network of school gardens can build healthier communities, engage students in learning, and grow food that is close to home.
Where we are now
Since 2012, Gardens 2 Schools has reached more than 10,000 individual students. Last year’s work was no exception. Garden Educators still meet classes in the beds. Volunteers still weed, harvest, and stand beside small groups at a tasting. Neighbors still gather for A Moveable Feast, the public night that puts local farms and restaurants on the same table as the mission.
We remain a Tuscaloosa organization with an Alabama-sized hope: that every child gets a garden classroom, and that the adults around them — teachers, families, University students, donors, and people who simply like to get dirty — keep showing up.
In our gardens we believe every student should have access to joy, love, knowledge, and safety. Diversity makes a garden resilient. We trust the same is true of this community.
The next chapter is still a schoolyard.
If you teach in one, we would like to hear from you. If you can give a morning, the beds will notice. If you can give so a Garden Educator can keep a weekly route, that gift lands in a child’s hands as soil, a radish, a question.