The beautiful pumpkin
This week, 8th graders are marking the close of their Edible Schoolyard experience with unforgettable pizzas made from scratch and cooked in the wood-fired oven. The garden is filled with the mouthwatering fragrance of pesto, caramelized onions, aromatic herbs, and garlic. Some students shared that they have been waiting for this moment since the 6th grade!
We began with an opening circle in the ramada, then split into three groups that rotated through various stations of pizza making. One group of students began in the kitchen. They harvested and prepared fresh toppings from the garden, including fresh marjoram, thyme, collard greens, and scallions. They also prepared dough for the following class, mixing together yeast, flour, salt, and extra-virgin olive oil and kneading the pliant dough into rounds. In between tasks, students were encouraged to create a reflection card encouraging them to draw or write their most memorable experience or lesson learned during their time in the kitchen and garden.
A second group began with building its own pizzas. Students shaped the dough and brushed the surface with garlic-infused olive oil. With a partner, they picked toppings of their choice: fresh eggs, herbs and greens from the garden, mozzarella, thin rounds of summer squash, kalamata olives, or tomato sauce and pesto students made earlier in the fall. Some pizzas were creatively shaped as a cat’s head or an alligator; others were dressed simply with cheese, garlic, and olive oil.
One corner of the garden was devoted solely to grinding grain into flour. Students furiously threshed wheat grown in the garden, releasing the wheat from the chaff. The wheat berries were then ground into flour using three different “technologies”–an ancient mortar and pestle, a hand mill, and a grain bike that produced fine flour. This station brought the experience full circle, bringing students into the creation of pizza from flour, to dough, to finished product.
At the closing circle, students responded to the question, “What wisdom would you pass on to an incoming 6th grader about the Edible Schoolyard?” Their responses resonated even beyond King Middle School:
“Try something new, even if you don’t like how it looks. You might be surprised that it tastes good.”
“Remember to have fun and don’t let the time pass by too fast.”
“Don’t wear your best shoes.”
This pizza party is a celebration of the students’ hard work in the garden and skills learned in the kitchen. It is also a time to mark the 8th grade students’ continuation on their journey into high school and the years beyond. Down the road, I hope we continue to hear from them and see them return to this garden and kitchen that their hands and hearts have helped to create.
Grinding the grain
Kneading the dough
Rolling the dough
Picking toppings
Raw pizza
Going in the oven
Ready to eat
When you plant potatoes it’s important to know the origins of your seed. Oftentimes store-bought potatoes are sprayed with chemicals that prevent them from sprouting and even potatoes from the farmer’s market could carry disease. The safest bet is to buy certified disease-free seed potatoes from a reliable source.
This year we are growing potatoes in the traditional way. We planted in a trough in the ground and then mounded up soil around the swollen stems as the potatoes began to grow. We are also experimenting with growing potatoes in potato towers, which is a technique used frequently by urban farmers and gardeners alike, as a productive space saving way to utilize vertical area and maintain a small footprint. This method is perfect for small urban backyard plots where you might not want to dedicate an entire bed to potatoes, and can even be successfully done in a space as small as a front stoop.
To build our potato towers, we used round wire cages (reused from our Oyster mushroom cultivation project) and lined the bottom with a thin layer of straw. Then we added about a foot of soil and compost, and lined the outside with straw to hold the soil in the cage (you can also use cardboard or newspaper to keep the soil from spilling out the gaps). We planted our potatoes in a ring, about six inches from each other and about four inches from the outside of the cage. Then we covered our set of seed potatoes with more soil and compost, and repeated this potato tower layer cake recipe until our cage was completely full. Soon enough we will see the green leaves of our spuds popping out from all sides of the tower. Come late summer we will have the pleasure of harvesting delicious potatoes grown in vertical space.
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:
- Check out those anthers
- Fuzzy sepals on the borage
- California poppies in bloom
- Our gorgeous flowering columbine
- Sepals protecting young kiwis
- Flowering pear, the ovary becomes the fruit
- Pollination in action
- Flowering quince
- Flowering rockrose
We start the class with some fact about bees. We explain that there are over 80 species of bees native to Berkeley, 1,500 species native to California, and a whopping 20,000 world-wide. We also tell the students that most of the species do not live in a colony, and are actually solitary and build their nests underground. We talk about how not all species sting, and that the only bees that do sting are female. We continue on with facts and history and then move into the garden to do some observing.
Observing bees and other insects brings the somewhat difficult concept of pollinating to life. Students learn that seed and fruit production are the result of this process and that the long-term sustainability of our food system depends on it. The students divide into groups and each group has a small net. We walk through the garden gently catching bees so we can take a closer look at the variety of colors and sizes that make up our Edible Schoolyard colony. After our careful observations we let them go and they get back to their important tasks.
By having a greater understanding of bees the students do not find them as scary, and see their immensely fascinating side. The observation also helps the groups appreciate all of the hard work and its importance in the life cycle of the garden, and our whole food system.
The board at the entrance of the ramada
Students catching bees in the echium
Observing one of the bees
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It seems like every place in the garden is more full of life than just a few weeks ago. The kiwis are leafing out, fruit trees everywhere are blooming and setting fruit, aphids have returned to the garden bringing with them their beloved ladybug predators, our hens are responding to longer daylight and laying more eggs, the winter cover crop is tall enough to be chopped down, weeds are growing faster than ever, and volunteer plants like amaranth and California poppies are shooting up everywhere. We even had the first ripe strawberry come in this week.
Not only did the equinox mark the start of spring, but it was a way for ESY to honor the tradition of many ancient cultures before us by sowing seeds with the new moon just before the transition of the season. In preparation for our Mother’s Day plant sale, we began sowing seeds on March 15th, which marked the new moon. By planting seeds according to the moon’s cycle it is thought that the water content and growth of the plants are affected. When the moon is new the light is stronger, pulls on the molecules of water within, and each swelling seed is pulled upwards away from the earth toward the sky. As the full moon wanes, we are able to take advantage of the opposite force and transplant the seedlings that will be pulled toward the earth and become rooted in their place.
Our greenhouse is completely filled to the brim with seeds that students have sowed over the past weeks and we have built outdoor tables to house our young plant friends that can germinate outside. Some of what we have planted includes 20 varieties of tomatoes, peppers, basil, parsley, cilantro, chard, collard greens, and kale.
The sprouting kiwi around the ramada
One of our vibrant green beds
It's spring
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
The rainwater we collect is used for irrigation purposes during the summer and fall. This process helps us lessen our dependence on municipal water sources and also decreases runoff into the San Fransisco Bay. Currently we are using the rainwater to irrigate our Oyster Mushrooms (the mushrooms have their own story that must be told, but that will have to wait until the next entry). They are fragile and prefer non-chlorinated water, so the rainwater couldn’t be a better match.
We are so grateful to the Alameda Countywide Clean Water Program for providing the grant that made this program possible! The rainy season is just beginning this year and we have already captured 1,000 gallons of water.
We had to dig a great big hole to make room for the water catchment system
It took a lot of hands to move the container
We had to push from many angles to get the right position
This is how it looks today, collecting water to feed the garden
The Mesopotamia Walk consists of three different stations: brick making with clay, sand, and straw; irrigation and dam construction in a giant sandbox; the walk and talk, where students are led through the garden looking at early tools and food plants first domesticated in Mesopotamia that we still grow and depend on today (some examples of this are leeks, cucumbers, figs, apples, and olives).
This activity is a real highlight of the sixth grade garden and kitchen curriculum. When our seventh grade students are asked what they remember most from the previous year in the garden many talk about the Mesopotamia Walk. We usually have science classes in the garden, but this activity is a great example of how any subject can be taught in a garden. We are deeply grateful to Beth Sonnenberg, one of our dedicated sixth grade teachers, for the development of this lesson.
One of the students collecting the dirt-hay mix to make bricks
The mold to form the bricks
Forming the bricks
The finished product
The irrigation sandbox
Students creating dams