Prompt : Saving Seeds

We saved garbanzo beans, bush beans, and calendula; next week it will be time for sunflowers!

The Seed Savers Exchange is the best resource I know of for learning more about this, and I encourage people to go ahead and try it, even if you don't consider yourself a gardener.  You'll be fascinated, and you cannot help but want to teach someone else about it.

In the garden, lately

I'm spending my teaching time in gardens, and I had the pleasure of teaching a four week class for preschoolers in September!  Here are some images from our explorations, from digging and cooking, to caring for animals and creating things.

Not everyone gets to learn about their food sources at such a young age!  How do you engage children with food and life cycles?

book love.

I came across this book, Fanny at Chez Panisse, at the library the other day and I am in love.  Its like Maira Kalman meets Moosewood.

Now that there isn't a day that goes by where I don't cook with kids, this book jumped out at me, and I'm glad it did.  Alice Waters was a massive part of the Edible Schoolyard movement, which we are, in a way, trying to emulate up here in northwest Washington.  And we don't need to be making incredible fancy things with our electric skillet at our picnic table.  We need to be celebrating what the kids can take out of the ground, and offer them the best tasting things we can get our hands on when the garden doesn't have enough to sustain us.

A garden in the pacific northwest in May and June isn't exactly pumping out food.  Is a tricky thing to balance what to buy at a store and bring, and what to skip.  There are so many potential "purposes" of garden education.  I think what we're trying to do is emphasize seed-to-table, and sometime that means that we may plant tomatoes and then eat tomatoes I've bought from the store.  As much as I'd like to say that I don't buy tomatoes in the winter, I do.  Perhaps that will change someday, but I do not have a personal garden.  Its also important to remember that we are not trying to blow children's minds with where their food comes from.  We're trying to get them to enjoy things that they grow.

As you can probably tell, I'm settling into the job.  It is an amazing opportunity and I live in an amazing town, and I hope that I'll be sharing more again soon!

Potential

First, if you've been reading this blog for a year, thank you!  New readers are great, too - I preface this post to old readers because I'm making a connection.

Last April, we discovered our outdoor space.  The door opens right from the classroom onto this terrace, and ideally, it will allow children to choose an outdoor activity or an indoor activity.  Last year, most of our experiences on the terrace were unstructured - we dug in the dirt of old potted plants, we drew with sidewalk chalk, and we drew in our sketchbooks.

As the ground starts to thaw this year, I have gardening on my mind.  This is an ideal space for growing some flowers and perhaps a few very simple vegetables, depending on what the children have in mind.  Thanks to Jolayne, I just ordered a copy of Grow Great Grub: Organic Food from Small Spaces, which I think will be helpful on our journey.  We definitely have a small space, and it would be wonderful for it to produce some great food - any food, really.

There is more information on the book's website here.

The other PreK class also has a door to the terrace, and we could have a really nice collaboration between the two classes outdoors.  We have a free-flow work time between the two classrooms twice weekly, and incorporating outdoor activities would be interesting.  Hearing the children's ideas about the terrace will have to come into play also, obviously - this is a different group from the initial terrace explorers, and they may have some very new ideas.

The sun is shining, and even though it is cold, I'm looking forward to our outdoor work.

Attacking the Edible Schoolyard

This piece in The Atlantic is a different view on the edible schoolyard.  This might help to sum up the article:

The cruel trick has been pulled on this benighted child by an agglomeration of foodies and educational reformers who are propelled by a vacuous if well-meaning ideology that is responsible for robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math (attaining the cultural achievements, in other words, that have lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt).

How do you feel?  Do you think that we can only advance with "important books" and "higher math", as a departure from our ancestors who scrabbled in the dirt? Or do you feel that we can (gasp!) find a combination of the two?

 

A few places I like to go :

The Edible Schoolyard 

Kids Gardening 

Occidental Arts and Ecology Center 

Seattle Tilth

Farming + Returning

Wouldn't you love to take your class here?

I was reading about how the teachers and children are embracing Farm-to-Table eating over at Leaves & Branches, Trunk & Roots -- what a wonderful resource to have a farm next door! We will be doing more growing this year, but it will definitely be more in the container gardening realm.

This is a week of meet-the-teacher visits and shortened class sessions to make everyone feel comfortable. I've met all of the students, and tomorrow we'll start becoming a classroom community. I have a lot of ideas bubbling in my head...we'll see what comes to life first!

See you back here on Friday for our new school year's resolutions. Please join in!