We began planning for the plant sale more than a year ago, with students grafting young apple trees.  Now the successful grafts are flourishing and will be for sale.  In November we took cuttings of some of our favorite herbs and currants and practiced vegetative propagation with students.  The hardy survivors are looking great and ready for sale.  In the winter we began sowing vegetable and flower seeds in our greenhouse– with the extra warmth and shelter, they grew quickly and now these potted starts are ready for the garden.  We are especially proud of our diverse tomato plants; over twenty varieties of tomato are represented, covering the color spectrum with red, pink, orange, yellow, green, and purple fruit.

The plant sale is Saturday May 8th from 9 am to 3 pm, and Sunday May 9th from 10 am to 1 pm.  On Saturday we will also have food and festivities, including homemade pizza and fresh salad, live music, face painting, Ici ice cream, Blue Bottle iced coffee, Bakesale Betty organic fried chicken sandwiches, tours led by King students, and Alice Waters will be signing her new book In the Green Kitchen.  Come and join us!

The welcome sign

The greenhouse surrounded by the plants for the sale

Our Edible Schoolyard grown mint and lemon verbena will be in the tea

One of our many delicious looking beds of lettuce

All the proceeds from In the Green Kitchen go to the Edible Schoolyard

Our freshly mulched strawberry patches

See you Saturday!

Students review the anatomy of the flower from a worksheet they completed in class, and then choose a flower in the garden that they would like to draw, dissect, and label.  We find the male and female reproductive parts of the flower (many flowers contain both parts), and dissect the ovaries to find the unfertilized seeds, the ovules.  We explore how flower petals attract pollinators with bright colors, patterns, and sweet scents.  My favorite part is the moment of understanding when students realize how the flower anatomy they learned on their worksheet applies to the actual fruits and vegetables that grow in the garden.  One student gasped, “You mean a kiwi is actually a plant ovary?  I’ll never look at kiwis the same way again.”

Some flower vocabulary:
Sepal: modified leaves which act as protection for the developing flower
Stigma: a sticky surface atop the female reproductive organ to trap and hold pollen
Anther: pollen-bearing part of the male reproductive organ

Here you will find pictures of just a few of the gorgeous flowers in the Edible Schoolyard garden right now:

Students measured the proper spacing between tree sites, then broke into the ground with shovels and pickaxes.  It was physically challenging but students’ spirits remained generally high.  I loved hearing the students’ visionary side come out during the planting process: there were comments of “we could stand right in this spot and pick plums” and “we should build a bench right here so that people can sit under the trees.”  We worked for two solid days preparing the ground with classes and student volunteers who dropped by after school to help with the project.  At last, we planted plums, pluots, prunes, apricots, and apriums in the new orchard, and watered them with water from our rainwater catchment tanks in the garden. Some of the trees are already starting to blossom a few days later, and they seem happy in their new home.  It felt good to beautify a neglected plot of land at school and do hard work from which everyone would benefit from the fruits of our labor–literally.

Thank you Dave Wilson Nursery for your generosity!

The first small holes

The first tree to go in the ground

Tying the tree to a stake to help support it

Getting ready to water

Watering the first tree

Our new orchard!

Grafting is a fine art that is perfected over years of practice. While pruning the apple trees this year, the garden teachers saved scion (first year wood) from some of our favorite varieties of apples, including Pink Pearl, Sierra Beauty, Golden Russet, and Spitzenburg, to name a few.  Students essentially clone these trees, by attaching the scion from the delicious varieties of apple to a root stock, which is basically an apple tree bred not for the fruit, but for strong, disease-resistant roots.  We use a grafting tool to cut a puzzle piece shape into both the root stock and the scion, and then carefully attach the two pieces and bandage up the union with tape.  If the cambium (the living part of the wood, just under the bark) of the scion and the cambium of the root stock touch, then the tree will heal over the wound and continue to grow.  Students were thrilled to imagine the possibilities that grafting trees provided; specifically, many got excited about ‘Franken-trees’ that produce a different variety of apple on every branch. We experimented a little with that in the garden this year, and hopefully next spring our plum trees will have branches that bear pluots!  Grafting fruit trees is also gratifying work because we can take something we have already (twigs from our existing trees) and use it to make new trees which we can plant, sell, or give away.  Many of the fruit trees that students grafted will be for sale at our plant sale/fundraiser in May.

Successful graft union fom last year (the greener wood is root stock, and browner wood is fruiting scion)

Our growing apple tree nursery for recently grafted trees

A close up of one of our lovely small trees

Some highlights of the conference were: hearing the wise words of seasoned farmers, activists, and food system experts such as Wes Jackson, Francis Moore Lappe, and Anim Steele; discussing the ideals and challenges of maintaining an ecologically sustainable and socially just food system on a large scale; hearing from Percy Schmeiser, a courageous Canadian farmer who stood up to Monsanto for contaminating his fields with genetically engineered canola; and witnessing the surprise appearance and speech of Kathleen Merrigan, Deputy Secretary of Agriculture of the United States.

The conference reinforced how the work we are doing with youth at King is part of a larger movement towards a more socially just and ecologically sane food system.  It is heartening to hear about all the good work that is happening around California and around the country, and it is a privilege to meet some of the founders of this movement and some of the inspired individuals who keep it going.   We have come a long way in thirty years in making “organic” a part of the mainstream vocabulary—and we still have a long way to go in making healthy food accessible to everyone.

We were excited to find that many of the olives this year had not been hit by the olive fruit fly, a pest whose larvae has decimated our olives in the past. Since the beginning of the school year, 6th grade students have been monitoring the olive fruit fly traps which we have hanging from each tree–a yeast-based solution that attracts the flies and then drowns them. All their hard work paid off, and now we have a hefty quantity of olives that students will be able to eat.

Olives are extremely bitter when eaten raw, and there are numerous ways to cure the fruit, ranging from caustic chemical baths to packing the fruit in rock salt. We decided to go with a saltwater brine method to cure the fruit and to draw out the bitterness. We stirred vast quantities of non-iodized salt into a jar of water–enough salt to make a raw egg float! The olives were added to the saltwater and they will soak in the brine for many weeks before they’re ready to eat.

The olives curing in brine

Cultivated vegetables are not all that responded well to the rain. We have gotten a flush of fungi in the garden since the storm, some of them magically appearing over night.  The most bizarre fungus I have ever seen popped up next to a garden path, emerging as a delicate reddish net from a white, egg-shaped base.  (I overheard one student explaining to her friend that “it hatches just like an alien.”)  Not only is the form of the mushroom strange and fantastical, but the smell is unbelievable.  The fungus (which we identified as Clathrus ruber, commonly known as a “stinkhorn”) emits a potent, rancid stench that brings to mind rotting flesh. Witnessing this freakish fungi always elicits comments of disgust and amazement–there is always something new and exciting for students to observe in the garden.

Aside from the thrill of the rain, students this week have been cooking a snack in the garden–a tasty treat called “Alegria.” Alegria is made with popped amaranth, honey, cinnamon, and sunflower seeds, likened by a student to a “healthy rice crispy treat.”  It is eaten as a street food in southern Mexico, India, and Pakistan.  Here in the garden, it’s served on an amaranth leaf and enjoyed at closing circle of a garden class.

The captivating and grotesque stinkhorn mushroom

Stirring popped amaranth, honey, and sunflower seeds for Alegria

Students pressing Alegria into shape

Dividing the Alegria into portions

Alegria served on amaranth leaves

Students compared the weight and volume of the apples with the weight and volume of the cider, and many were surprised to see that twenty pounds of apples were reduced to about half their weight in juice. The dry, spongy apple pulp left over was deposited into the worm box so that the worms could feast on the by-products of the cider-making process and make fresh castings to fertilize the apple trees and other plants in the garden.

At the closing circle of each garden class, students shared their impressions of the cider. Many said it was one of the best drinks they had ever tasted. Some of my favorite descriptions were, “alive,” “silky,” “thick,” “golden,” “better than the juice in the store,” “flavorful,” “sour and sweet all at the same time,” “natural,” “like drinking the nectar straight from a flower,” and “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”

We couldn't bear to juice this Cox's Orange Pippin from one of our espaliered trees!

The spinning cider press blades