Community Garden
LTCES is excited to welcome our community to the Lake Trail Community-Educational School Garden. This is a welcoming space for both the school and broader community, which supports a broad range of activities and events. Garden infrastructure includes garden boxes, a greenhouse, irrigation, and a waterproof shade sail structure which further extends the use of the garden for the school and the community into the shoulder seasons.
Garden Gnome Potluck Parties
Our Thursday evening garden meetup isn’t a work party… it’s a workPARTY!
We gather to grow food, share meals, and build community. We call ourselves the Garden Gnomes, and there’s always room for more. Come dig in, connect, and celebrate the joy of gardening together.
🌱 Free and open to all ages
🌿 No gardening experience needed
Runs from 5:00 PM–8:00 PM
🍽️ “Fun-luck” dinner starts at 6:00 PM
We cook and harvest from the garden, and potluck contributions are welcome—only if it feels fun and easy to bring something along. Somehow, there’s always enough to go around.
Just show up, or email foodandgarden@ltces.ca for more info.
Commons Corner
We’re excited to share a fantastic update from the Lake Trail garden this summer!
Thanks to a new partnership with the Youth Climate Corps (YCCBC) and support from the City of Courtenay, a dynamic group of young changemakers has joined the LTCES team. Their energy, creativity, and commitment are helping breathe new life into underutilized areas of the garden. It’s an incredible gift to have such passionate youth contributing to this work.
We’re also proud to announce that LTCES was selected as a recipient of the Gone to Seed Little Library Native Plant Grant! With this generous support, we’re transforming a previously overlooked space into something beautiful, meaningful, and rich with purpose.
As we tend to the “Commons Corner,” we’re cultivating a vibrant fruit and native plant ecosystem designed to welcome students and community members alike. We envision this space as a place to connect with plant kin, enjoy nature’s gifts, and find opportunities for learning, rest, and nourishment.
Our dream is to grow a living classroom—a space where people can explore ethnobotany, celebrate local biodiversity, and deepen their relationship with the land, all with love, respect, and awe.
School Garden Programming
The Lake Trail Garden is a vibrant, living classroom where students can connect with the land, their peers, and the rhythms of nature.
Lake Trail students engage with the garden through lunchtime and after-school programs, while teachers bring classes into the space for hands-on, outdoor learning.
Each week, students in The Zone Lifeskills program help care for the garden—planting, watering, weeding, and nurturing the space. Other classes participate in seasonal projects like Spuds in Tubs, a fun, tactile learning experience that sparks a genuine enthusiasm for growing food (especially potatoes!).
We believe that the garden is a natural extension of the classroom. That’s why we’re working hard to expand outdoor learning opportunities, including the creation of Commons Corner and future plans for a dedicated nature classroom beneath the shade sail.
Garden Education
Garden Workshop Series
LTCES has a long history of offering community workshops from experienced gardeners.
Be sure to check back for workshop offerings.
Project Goals
- Building a safe outdoor space that is welcoming for both the school and broader community, and which supports a broad range of activities and events.
- Offering a natural garden environment for the many residents in our surrounding neighbourhoods that do not have access to backyards.
- Inclusion of Indigenous knowledge through plantings, programming, and plant interpretation.
- Teaching tools and methods to grow food locally and contributing towards a more resilient urban neighbourhood.
- Building hope and food security in the face of climate change.