We grew a prize cabbage bigger than a basketball!

We had a great time weighing and and calculating how many ounces per student a 8 1/2lb cabbage would feed.
We then paired it with a purple cabbage and chopped and shredded and then fed 80 students about 2 ounces each.
Yum Fun!

A few weeks ago I led a garden poetry class for my 2nd and 3rd graders at Summerland Elementary, and I was blown away with their haikus. It’s natural really 😉 The garden is a perfect place for inspiration. My favorite poet, Mary Oliver, writes almost exclusively about the natural world, but her subject is never just nature and it’s beauty, though that would be enough. She often uses the natural world as a lens through which to see the whole world, to examine our priorities and reflect on life.

Our school gardens serve much the same purpose. They are not merely beautiful, peaceful spaces, though they are that. They serve as forums to bring education to life and give it real world context, playgrounds for children to interact with the natural world, science labs where they can safely explore and experiment, and sanctuarys where they can escape the hectic playground and find beauty and peace.

It’s so very important that spaces like this be provided for children. These haikus speak to that so beautifully.

-Lanette Anderson

GEM at Summerland and Aliso Elementary

 

Plants are beautiful
Plants are life and love and change
Plants can be cool too   – Luke

Leaves are very cool
They make their food for the plant
Precious plants make food   – Cason

Spirit flowers grow
in a pace, position slow.
It is wonderful!   -Evan

1st graders at Hapgood Elementary acted as Animal Detectives searching for insects, birds and other animals in the school garden.  They turned over logs to find worms, observed rolly pollys on a rotting pumpkin, and noted a hummingbird pollinating a shrub. Students sketched these critters and silently observed as scientists. Finding and observing snails was a highlight for the students.  Near the end of the class, the teacher decided to have the students observe the movement of the snails with a “race” and the entire class gathered around to watch!

The Tomato

By Anthony

 

I see the red, plump tomato.

Ripe and ready to eat,

but no one picks it.

Why?

Why does no one pick you?

 

I picked you and bit into you.

I thought you were a tomato,

but you were a bell pepper!

 

You tasted like watermelon mixed with hot peppers.

Now you’ve been picked

and eaten

and are being digested

by my stomach acid.

Thanks to a generous donation from Carpeteria in Goleta, the kids now have carpet squares to take to find their own special spot in the garden to work. In this writing exercise, we were imagining what it would be like to be a scarecrow.  I think the scarecrow at Franklin/Adelante looks pretty happy, replete with recycled skateboard wheels for hair, from Art from Scrap.

 

We s’Cool Garden educators work every week in our organic gardens to convey the virtues of sustainable  management to our kids. Discussing concepts like environmental stewardship and healthy eating and dialoging with students about how to live our lives in ways that create  healthy people, healthy plants and a healthy planet. We teach out students about composting and worm bins, cover crops and beneficial insects. And they love it. They eat it up, literally and figuratively. Gobbling up tomatoes and strawberries right off the plants and reminding each other why it’s safe to eat the food that way, “It’s organic, you don’t have to wash it”, “It’s just a little dirt, you can brush that off'”. It’s a wonderful thing for children to form an intimate relationship with a garden and with their food, it connects them to their world and to their health in a way that, I think, nothing else can. Which is why I think it’s so important to maintain these spaces as organic and why I’m so proud to be a part of the Summerland school community’s push to make their school and hopefully the entire Carpinteria School District a pesticide free zone. I feel reinvigorated this morning about fighting that good fight after an inspiring turn out to last night’s CUSD Board meeting to discuss pesticide use in schools. I spoke briefly, representing the garden and my voice was joined by so many other concerned community members, from parents and teachers to doctors and local grounds keepers who have “gone organic”. All were expressing their concern, but more importantly I feel, they were presenting viable solutions and offering their individual expertise and personal time to help the school district make the switch.  It will be interesting to see how the board processes all that they heard last night and what comes of it. I am aware of how slow and laborious they kinds of bureaucratic processes can be, but I am also very hopeful and inspired by the outpouring of support for this worthy and important cause.

-Lanette Anderson

The teachers for our English Language Development at Adelante Charter wanted to use contextual learning techniques, so they chose the garden to be the focus of their summer session. We harvested, fertilized, weeded, and the older kids wrote a garden guide of our experiences.  The last day was a cooking class – tomato herb spread, with 4 different nuts from California.  Though everyone was anxious to try it right out of the bowl, we made a beautiful display, accompanied with our Jamaica tea, and the kids practiced serving others and asking “Would you like some tea?”  Through the tortuous wait, I reminded the kids that their caregivers probably served them first everyday throughout their whole lives.  What a gift that is!

We ended off our incredible garden year at Adelante Charter with a field trip to Fairview Farms in Goleta.  Fairview’s wonderful staff stumped us all straight away with the question – What is the most important thing on the farm?  The soil! As we meandered through orchards, chicken hideaways, bee territories, and goat stalls, we could feel underfoot that this was true. The carrot taste test proved it! The soil, the food, the environment is alive and well at the farm.

Thank you Fairview!

Do you remember that TV show, “Kids Say The Darnedest Things”? Pretty basic premise, you give children a microphone and just wait for them to say something funny, which they inevitably will. Well I heard a lot of those precious musings from my students in the garden this year and the thing that struck me was not only their humor but also their wisdom. In fact often the very thing that made the quips funny at all was the fact that they were really wise words just spoken by seven year olds, people far too young we might think to make such astute observations or offer such sage advice.

So in this blog post, as I reflect upon a year gone by in our lovely gardens, I’d like share some of those wise and witty words with you. I hope you enjoy.

“They’re not going to hurt you if you eat them. They’ll just come out in your poop” – 1st grader at Aliso Elementary commenting on aphids on her kale.

“Wait, just a little more. We have to be patient.” One 1st grader to another as they sat waiting for some swallows in our garden to emerge from their nests. (They were soon rewarded for their patience)

My personal favorite-

“Everything is connected.” From a Kindergartner!!  After watching me step on a garden snail.

– Lanette Anderson

GEM at Aliso & Summerland Elementary