A Garden Year

The Three “S”es

2012-03-16T19:58:00.002-07:00

Kind of like the three R’s (you know, Reduce, Reuse,Recycle), but wetter. Ourfollow-up to our first hands-on rainy-day watershed lesson is our ever-popularboots-on rainy-day watershed lesson. How do you help the rainwater replenish the aquifer and not all justescape to the sea?

First, we follow the water. All over the campus, down drains and through pipes andacross the field, down through the garden.

And way out back, T has created two waterflows, one straightand direct and FAST, the other using the Slow it, Spread it, Sink itlesson. S times 3. And we see which one would allow thesalmon to spawn safely.

Thenthe kids use their shovels, hands and wits to turn the fast-flow into a slowerone. And maybe they don’t alwaysrecall what the three “S”es are, but their bodies know. I’m always trying to explain to my ownkids why they should not waste water, but I never find a way that they can hearme. But out here in the muck, Ihear the kids explaining it to each other. Somehow the process ofslowing the water allows concepts like “aquifer” and “wildlife habitatpreservation” to spread out and sink in. Or maybe it just helps to have muddy boots.

No recipe, unless you count mud pies. Which, in my opinion, have a quite high nutritional content.

Recipe to come

2012-03-08T15:15:00.000-08:00

Well, we had stomach flu at our house, so I wasn't at garden class this week. But apparently they made yummy greens and potatoes, and I'll try to get the recipe as soon as I can...

Rain, Rain, Come and Stay

2012-03-01T19:25:00.000-08:00

Neither rain nor sleet nor snow… okay, well, we don’t really have those last two aroundhere. But we certainly aren’tletting a little rain stop us from having garden class this week. Especially since we’ve had so littlerain this year, so all of our “rainy day” curricula are languishing in thefiling cabinet. Hurrah for therain!

Number one on our rain list: watersheds. I grew up near a creek, the flow ofwater toward which was so easy to see in the acres of open farmland. I didn’t know the word watershed anddidn’t really need to, having an intuitive understanding of the process ofwater flowing toward the sea.

But these kids mostly live where there are lots of houses,and it’s not always clear where the water in the drainage ditch beside thedriveway is heading. To theneighbors, right?

So watersheds is our main rainy day theme, and it startswith the big picture. Big trays ofclay that the kids mold into pathways by which precipitation flows toward thewetland (a sponge) and then the ocean. Hands-on learning, indeed.

(No cooking today—our kitchen is wet wet wet.)

special president's week edition

2012-02-24T16:18:00.000-08:00

There's no school, so presumably we are all home reading. At our house, we are actually, for once, honoring the Presidents' Holiday by reading this brilliant book:

Buy it from your local independent bookseller and enjoy forever. Pay no heed to the misconception that your kids are "too old" for picture books. This one has the Gettysburg Address on the endpapers. Maira Kalman, who can do no wrong, loves Lincoln and she will make you love him too. Hurrah for her!

Free-for-all

2012-02-18T13:41:00.000-08:00

The faithful readers may have noticed that so far, February has been, well… a little difficult. The kids were pushing at the boundaries, hard. So at the beginning of this week’s class, with the children all lined up on benches waiting for their assignments, I was fully expecting T to give a stern lecture on, oh, you know, Respect and Following Directions and so on.

Nope.

Instead, she asked them to choose their activity. “Who wants to build raised beds? Who wants to cook?” Whaaa? She’s letting them pick? Surely, chaos and pandemonium will ensue!

The potential chefs warily ask, “What are we cooking?” to which T responds breezily, “Whatever you want!” and sends the two who want to cook trotting off toward me, the assigned kitchen helper of the day, who had in fact been told that we were making sautéed greens.

Well, okay then, um, kid choice. I did have to clarify a bit: “We can make whatever you want within the parameters of what ingredients are available. And what’s ready for harvest is mostly kale.”

These kids, though, they are incredible! They harvested a HUGE mess of kale, found a leek and some garlic in the garden, and went to town. They also wanted biscuits, and there happened to be a big bag of Pamela’s gluten-free baking mix in the fridge, so they whipped out a big batch of gluten-free drop biscuits in time for the box-builders to have a fabulous after work snack.

The afternoon group, five cooks in all, decided that greens were off the menu, so they made pizza, or, well, they made the closest thing to pizza we could do given our aforementioned parameters.

And guess what? They were angels. Given some space, some latitude, and an opportunity to invent, they also self-regulated, which worked out far better than our attempts to regulate them usually do. Ahhh, freedom.

So, kid-inventions below.

(Plus, the other groups built some rocking redwood garden beds!)

Super-delicious greens

Harvest a big bunch of kale. Then harvest double that amount, while explaining to the kids how greens cook down much smaller than their original size.Harvest, wash and chop one leek, sauté in olive oil.

While waiting for leek to cook, chop up a small head of slightly green heirloom red garlic (sooo yum), then add that into the pan.

While all that was going on, someone was washing and chopping up the kale. Add as much as you can fit (about half) into the pan until the pan is heaped high, then watch it cook down. Add some Bragg’s Amino Acids and dump it into a bowl.

Decide that before you cook the rest of the greens you will roast up some pumpkin seeds in your pan so throw those in. When they seem toasty, add a bit more oil and the rest of the kale, sauté until bright green and soft. Add more Bragg’s if you want.

Combine the two batches and chow down. Very excellent served with gluten-free drop biscuits.

Garlic flatbread (the foodstuff formerly known as pizza)

Harvest some red garlic. Get a bit carried away, and harvest a lot.

Wash, peel and chop small, sauté.

Meanwhile, set up two bowls for dough. Let the kids figure out what they want in their dough (okay to give hints). Bowl #1 used one egg, gluten-free baking mix, and some water. Bowl #2 used wheat flour, an egg, some baking powder (no yeast on hand), and salt. They each mixed and kneaded and flattened out the dough on a cookie sheet as best they could.

Spread oil and sautéed garlic all over the dough, cook at 450 or so until brown on edges (gluten-free cooks faster, fyi), about 10ish minutes.

While baking explain psychology of naming food to kids: if they tell their classmates they are serving "pizza," the kids will be expecting tomato sauce and cheese. If they say "garlic bread," they will be expecting sliced bread with butter. "Garlic flatbread," consensus reached by the time the food was ready. And the kids all loved it!

stick-to-it-ness

2012-02-11T16:34:00.000-08:00

This week, by noon, we were ready to throw in the kitchendishtowel. The kids had been greatwhile on-task, but when they sat down to eat their bowls of pasta and hear astory about--you guessed it!--reverence,in preparation for next week’s tree-planting ceremony… Well, let’s just say that “reverence”was not the theme of the day. Thetheme of the day was more stick-with-it-even-when-you-feel-entirely-discouraged-and-sure-whatever-it-it-you-are-doing-will-never-work.

Midway through the morning class, when T walked past thekitchen with her group of tired raised-bed carpenters, she asked how thepasta-making was going.

“Awesome!” the kids chorused, showing off their longcascades of spaghetti.

“Yes, now,” I added. “But it did require a certain amount of stick-to-it-ness.” (Refer to the recipe below!)

Fortunately, the kids’ pre-irreverent modeling of thatstick-to-it-ness was just the lesson that I needed to help me not flee interror before the afternoon group came. The morning group is usually the Calm Group. Yikes.

But we stayed, and they came, and for my group I laid outthe boundaries of expected behavior clearly. (Something like: “I have NOpatience today for people not listening. I have lots of nice but no patience left, so you’re either in gardenclass or out, and out means the office.”) And amazingly, that’s all they needed: an adult with no patienceleft. We started to measure outthe flour, and we each stuck to our job even through the sticky bits, and weall had plenty of nice (even though it seemed unlikely), and plenty of pasta(even though it seemed like it would never work), and plenty of fun (well, ofcourse).

Pasta, a recipe for eight hands

a.k.a. the easiest recipe in the world (to remember, not tomake)

1 cup flour

1 egg

Some warm water if it won’t stick together.

Quadruple it to feed ten kids plus helpers (that’s two bowlseach with a doubled recipe).

Oh, plus we added some garlic powder just for fun. Let’s describe it as a “dash.”

Mix flour with garlic powder and make a hole in the middleof the flour to crack the eggs in: one egg per two hands. Beat eggs with a fork and then mix intoflour. We needed a few tablespoonsof warm water to get our dough to stick (probably depends a lot on your flourand the size of the eggs).

Be careful not to make it too sticky as you have to run itthrough the pasta machine.

Knead the dough and divide into four balls (that’s if you’refeeding lots of kids—if you did the one cup flour/one egg version then you haveone ball of dough). Flatten eachball with hard smacks from the eight hands and crank it through the pastamachine. Cranking each machinerequires at least four hands working on concert to keep the crank going, the machinefrom escaping from the clamp holding it to the table, and the dough goingproperly both in and out of the rollers.

Theoretically, the dough will emerge as a long strip offlattened dough. In practice, itmight come out of the machine as a bunch of sloppy dough shreds. This will seriously challenge the faiththat the group previously had in the machine, themselves, and their adulthelper.

Try again! Moreshreds. Cheerlead a bit,hopefully. Press the shreds into asomething resembling a messy slab and try again. Woohoo! Bigger,flatter shreds! We can do it! Keep going. Flatten, crank, repeat. Eventually, if you believe, and stick to it (not to themachine, that would be overly disheartening), you will in fact have a long thinstrip of dough. Which you can foldin half and keep running through the machine as you adjust the rollers to becloser and closer together.

This roll, fold, repeat maneuver is not in the printedinstructions, but if you happen to have watched your friend the professionalchef make pasta with this own kids one night, you will recall that he did thisso it seems like probably a good idea.

Miraculously, the sheets eventually turn shiny and beautifuland you can move the crank handle over to the noodle-cutting part of themachine, and crank the sheet through to the delight of the owners of the eighthard-working hands!

(Confession: we used jar tomato sauce. But we also harvested kale and sautéedit to eat with the pasta. Withgrated parmesan for all.)

YUM!!

C is for Cabbage, and Cold, and Coleslaw, and Compromise

2012-02-03T17:26:00.000-08:00

It’s cold season, so T started off the class with a brieftalk about Vitamin C, where you find it, and how it works. Her theater training really pays offwhen it comes to engaging the kids’ attention: they were transfixed by herimpersonation of the immune system. Then we set off for the garden with a plan: food with high C-contenttoday!

This week I was off remixing a barrel of dirt with my group(that’s a process of digging, dumping, blending nutrients--compost!--into thesoil, and refilling) and planting peas, greens, and flowers, so when we headedin to wash up and eat the coleslaw that the cooking group had made, I asked thekitchen helper mom if she followed the recipe as written that I found lyingbeside the chopping boards.

“Yes, I followed it exactly,” she said.

“Wow. Thatnever happens,” I murmured as I copied it down to post. Word for word, starting to wonder if Ineeded to credit the source. Idon’t usually since our normal garden kitchen procedure is to mangle thestarting recipe far beyond recognition before we are done.

“Oh, except, I didn’t do the thing with the apples,” sheremembered, after I carefully wrote out the too-many steps to prevent applebrowning. “I just put them inlast.”

“Okay, cool.”

We serve ourselves big bowls of the immune-supporting slaw.

“Hey, there are carrots in here. That wasn’t in the recipe.”

“Well, they were on the table, so we used them.”

“Of course. AndI’m noticing a bottle here that appears to have once contained agave syrup.”

“Oh, yeah. Weused that too.”

Recipe, take two. Source: what’s on the table, with a few tips from an old CSA newsletterfrom Taylor Maid Farm.

Cold-season Coleslaw

1 red cabbage, hacked to bits

1 green cabbage, similarly prepped

However many carrots are in a bunch, grated

A panful of roasted walnut pieces

Some crispy apples, grated at the last minute

2 Tbsp apple cider vinegar

Lemon juice from one lemon

Sea salt

Fresh ground pepper

1/2 cup olive oil

However much agave syrup remains in a mostly used-up bottle

Asplash of heavy cream (if you’ve got vegans)
(Come to think of it, with that much cabbage they probably doubled the dressing recipe as it was originally written for a single-cabbage slaw.)

Whisk vinegar, lemon juice, salt & pepper together, then whisk in olive oil. Then agave and cream. Toss with cabbage, carrots, walnuts and apples. Serve.

How to harvest broccoli

2012-01-27T16:50:00.000-08:00

Okay, truth is, this week they were all Wild Child and Wild Child was so wild that I amstill recovering and have zero energy for blogging. But I probably don’t need to say what happened in gardenclass to the rest of you third grade parents since you are the ones at homescrubbing out the mud-soaked clothes and silt-swamped shoes…

Unless your kids was in this group of kids who managed tomove a bunch of compost without getting drenched:

But, in brief, here goes.

You know, this is just one of those things that I so hate to admit I didn’t know before I went to thirdgrade garden class. But Ididn’t. I never knew the correctway to harvest broccoli. Not thatI’ve ever had much to harvest beyond a few little florets. But still. I hope someday to need to know how to harvest broccoli. And now I do. (You cut it diagonally below the florets you want to eat butabove healthy leaves so the stalk can send out some new florets.)

Broccoli with lemon butter

Make a pot of brown rice.

Harvest and cut up broccoli (florets and stems), steam.

Melt some fake butter (for the non-dairy types); squeeze outa lemon; mix “butter” and juice.

Mix broccoli, lemon butter, a big handful of sesame seeds,and some Bragg’s Amino Acids (Extra squirts for the kids who like itsalty). Serve over the rice. Yum.

We're all in this together

2012-01-21T12:59:00.000-08:00

My favorite line this week: “There’s no such thing as your stick and my stick,” Bossy Boots huffs to Wild Child, who has applied his frenzied energy to the pruning job we are doing while waiting for the biscuits to bake.

We are cutting back the tajetes lucida (Mexican marigold) bush, a job I have taken on annually, fearing it will take over the school garden the same way it has colonized all unwary areas of my own, proving second only to the blackberries in persistent, unwelcome spreading. According to wikipedia, tajetes is actually a very interesting and useful plant. We could be using the leaves in place of tarragon! In fact, we could have used them in our herb butter today. If only our herb butter had been butter… see recipe. But the kids are dismantling the plant quite effectively, in a many-hands-make-light-work collective sort of way.

Unlike the picture I grabbed off the web (my camera is broken), our bush currently looks like a brown stick-bush, thanks to the recent freezing nights. So the kids are surprised to realize, as they cut back (to best of their ability given that we give them child-size clippers with limited capacity for cutting anything over a 1/2 cm diameter), that the plant is still very much alive.

"Hey, it’s alive in here,” Wild Child notes. “We’re not hurting it, are we?”
Assured that, no, they aren’t hurting it, just allowing it to grow back healthier, they attack with full abandon, each coveting the longer sticks. But Bossy Boots reminds them that this is a collective task. “There’s no such thing as your stick and my stick.” All together now.

Hot Biscuits on a Cold Day (Seriously, what could be better, since our “classroom” is outdoors?)

2 cups flour or gluten-free baking mix (For the wheat version, we used the bag of white flour b/c I didn’t notice the jar of whole wheat until it was too late. Half white/half whole wheat works well.)
2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
1/2 t baking soda
5-6 T Earth Balance or other fake butter
3/4 c buttermilk

Mix dry ingredients, cut in butter substitute, then stir in buttermilk. Knead, roll out, and cut out rounds with any old jar you have sitting around.
Bake at 425 for 12-15 minutes.

Herb Butter

DO NOT do what we did, which was keep the cream cold, chill the jar, and chill the marbles. Our butter was what my kids call a “big fail.” We served our biscuits with runny herb whipped cream. Start with everything at room temperature.

1 pint heavy cream
5 marbles
A big handful of chopped (or pulverized if the kids prefer the mortar and pestle approach) herbs, whatever you like, we used parsley and thyme

Throw it into a jar and shake until you have butter. This is a GREAT activity if Wild Child has extra energy—just send her jogging around the field with the jar for a few laps. With our too-cold version, it made a great example of how we all much pitch in to accomplish a task, as everyone’s shaking arm had plenty of opportunities to get tired.

thank you, garden program

2012-01-13T12:19:00.000-08:00

Overheard at my house this week:

Nine-year-old to six-year-old, "If you don't put the greens on your taco, you are missing out on a BIG TREAT. Seriously."

Tis the (next) season

2012-01-06T11:07:00.000-08:00

Our garden teacher not only knocks herself out designingthis soul-feeding program for our kids, she also has kids of her own. And not just the two with whom shelives (off the grid, by the way, growing their own food, generally showing therest of us how unnecessarily comfortable our lives are). As for the others, well, I guess sincethey are sheep, not goats, they are lambs, not kids.

It’s lambing season, the stresses of which I only vaguelyrecall from my teenage reading of All Creatures Great and Small, a Yorkshire country vet’s account of his yearsstumbling around barns extracting stuck lambs from their mothers. The whole venture gives me a sense ofwet wool steaming in the cold, and wobbly legs. (And since I was a midwife for a time, bright red afterbirthas well.)

So the garden is fallow, we have a break from garden classfor a few more weeks, and T is home on her land with the lambs, receiving fieldtrips of wide-eyed school children yearning for a glimpse of a fresh-made babyanimal. There’s nothing like newlife to start a new year off right. We’ll hope for rain, and let this year take a few more weeks to get itswobbly legs working right.

And I will refrain from providing even one recipe for rack oflamb.

Winter break

2011-12-30T11:11:00.000-08:00

No school. No garden class. No rain.

I don't mind the first two. But maybe a bit of the third would be nice?

See you after break--if you're looking for some reading, check last week's holiday message...

Real, True Gifts

2011-12-24T22:55:00.000-08:00

These long dark nights of winter break remind me of my owninner darkness. Sometimes I ammean. And hard-hearted. Just before the break, I wasmeanly resenting the students in the garden for not appreciating what was beinglaid before them. They wererestless and inattentive. To them,it seemed much more like classroom learning than most moments in the garden:they were being asked to copy something from the blackboard, to draw and labelthe layers of compost that they had been assembling in the new pile. They whined and interrupted. I spoke up: “Guys, I keep hearingpeople talking while T is trying to explain something, and it doesn’t feel veryrespectful to me.” Okay, notso very mean. But what I meant was“shut the %&*# up, this is important. She is giving you a gift here, people.”

I was acutely aware of this gift, having had the need to call upon it not long before. The story: I am particularly hard-hearted when it comes to mydepriving my own kids of the pleasures of modern life, namely, movies. My poor kids are so movie-starved thatwhen I am too ill to do anything but lie in bed, I can show them acheese-making instructional video and they actually enjoy it. But recently, weary from variouspersonal stressors, I decided to let them watch an actual, mainstream, narrative-based film. For thisspecial event I chose Wall-E, based onmy completely uninformed impression that it had a strong pro-environmentmessage.

Wall-E,unfortunately, did not give us an evening of relaxed family time. Rather, my five-year-old whined throughmost of it that it was boring, and my ten-year-old ended up in tears. Given that the movie has an predictablyhappy ending, the tears confused me, until my sweet, sad boy said, in referenceto the earth overrun by life-killing garbage that provides the backdrop for therobot love story: “I feel like that’s really happening.”

My kid sees a planet being abused. And who am I to correct him? When we are willing to let drop all the masks we wear toprotect ourselves from seeing it, we know he’s right. That’s what’s really happening, in many ways, perhaps notprecisely through the over-accumulation of soda cans, but from theover-accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere and toxins in ourenvironment. It’s real. And scary. And sad.

So, what do you tell a kid who is describing a basic truthabout the world, a sad, scary truth? You hand him another truth, a concrete, real, hopeful one. You say, “But you and I, and all thekids at school, we will not let a world like that happen, a world without soil,without plants, without food. Withoutlife. Because you and I, and allthe kids at school, we know how to make dirt. We know how to create a place for plants to grow, and how togrow food. We, all of us, willnever let that happen.” And whenyou say that, he nods, and you see some light return to his eyes.

May the light ever return, and may we pass on the gifts thatwe are given. Now, let’s make some dirt.

Recipe in pictorial form:

How to make Compost Cake:

(And later in the year, once their dirt-making pile issmokin’ hot, I’ll make them the chocolate version. So check back in the springtime.)

Everyone loves latkes (even Santa)

2011-12-16T18:21:00.000-08:00

Last spring, during the last week of school, I corralled ahandful of second grade boys into planting a bed full of potatoes. They, to be honest, would have ratherbeen playing tetherball. But Itold them, panic rising in my voice: “but if we don’t plant the potatoes, wewon’t have latkes next winter!” That got ‘em digging. Everyone loves latkes, even the kids who don’t know what they are.

Truth be told, our potato bed didn’t fare as well as usualand this year’s latke potatoes were storebought. But the kids did follow the rhythm of it, spring plantingfor winter food.

The third grade focusses its learning around Hebrew culture,so this last week before winter break, latkes are always on the menu. They’ve been learning “Oh, Hanukkah”since kindergarten, so they are well primed by “Gather round the table, we'llgive you a treat/Dreidels to play with and latkes to eat…” Though somehow, the religioussignificance of the oil and the festival of lights seems somewhat watered downby the proliferation of Santa hats around the table. Ah, well, we feed them, and some of it they absorb, right?

The Two (no-so-secret) Secrets to making good Latkes

Secret Number One: get the starch OUT of the potatoes!

Give each kid a good-sized potato to grate. Have two at a time dump their gratedpotato into a thin muslin cloth, twist it up and squeeze all the liquidout. Squeeze hard, then dumpnow-dry grated potato into a large bowl. Repeat for each pair of kids. Meanwhile, discuss all the possible uses for potato starch if you choseto save the “squozed-out” liquid and dry the starch.

Have each kid beat one egg and add to potato bowl, throw ina teaspoon or so of salt (we used about 1.5 teaspoons per dozen potatoes), and mix.

Secret Number Two: have the oil HOT!

This means that really, you have to read the kids a storywhile a parent fries the latkes in an insane frenzy of hot oil and flame. Remind them of the significance of theoil and the menorah. Serve thoselatkes hot off the stove (after a quick drain on paper towels), with theapplesauce they made last week. Keep frying until everyone has had thirds and you are out of potatomixture.

Then, since they gobbled so fast, let them play in the woodsuntil the time for garden class is over. ‘Cause there’s nothing like muddy feet to add a sense of the sacred intoany day.

Apple (a) Day

2011-12-10T09:27:00.001-08:00

On Wednesday, third grade garden day, my third grader wakesup with a stomach ache. Hecomplains of this particular complaint with enough frequency that I usuallymake him go to school for main lesson and if he still remembers that he has astomach ache at recess time, he can come home. Usually by recess, it’s gone. But there were enough nocturnal rumblings from that cornerlast night justify a day off. Forhim.

Unfortunately, it’s the busy holiday season and no one cansub for me in the garden, so the boy home from school has to go to school withme. He brings his drawing pad anda blanket and we make him a little nest near my workstation. The garden can’t spare an adult today:it’s apple day. We have multiple sharp objects for peeling and slicing, plus,as a bonus, boiling hot applesauce to put into boiling hot jars. All hands on deck. (This year we did apple day at theschool with apples brought from a parent’s trees, but to get a sense of it, seelast year’s apple day.)

My station is applesauce cake, the position of leastdanger. No knives or peelers,mostly just measuring cups and spoons, to intersect cleanly with the measuringsegment the kids are doing in math.

We get the cake mixed, and Wild Child points at me, “Um, YOUare BLEEDING.” Somehow, in mylittle station of round objects, I have gashed my knuckle, as if just knowingthat there are people peeling apples within 100 feet is enough to take off someskin. WC then starts achorus of “Ooooh, gross!” and immediately takes advantage of the fact that Ihave turned my back to wash off the blood and grab a band-aid; WC leads thegroup over to the little pond where they immediately all break off chunks ofice so they can then yell about how cold their hands are.

I make themwash their hands so they can get the batter into the pan and then theoven. “Why do we have to wash ourhands AGAIN?” they whine, clutching the chunks of pond ice. “Um…” I roll my eyes. “Why don’t you think about that as youwalk to the sink?”

Once the cake is in the oven, my little sick guy lurks nearthe baking warmth and good smells. Poor thing, he won’t be able to have any of the cake that will go backto class as celebration for the teacher’s birthday.

Fortunately, by midday we determine that we have peeled andchopped enough apples to shut down the sharp objects workstation, freeing up anadult to relieve me in the kitchen, and they send us home.

We pick up my kindergartener and head home to make our ownapplecake from the same recipe. And by the time it gets out of the oven, steaming warm spice, we allfeel better.

Applesauce Cake

(makes 2 9-inch pans or 1 Bundt pan with extra for a coupleof little cake-lets)

Preheat oven to 350. Grease & flour pans.

Cream (forks in the garden, mixer at home):

2 sticks butter

1 1/2 cups orless brown sugar (use less if your applesauce is sweetened)

Beat in:

2 large eggs

Mix:

3 cups flour

(in the garden we use 100% whole wheat, at home we did 2cups white and 1 whole wheat)

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp cloves

1/4 tsp nutmeg (fresh grated in the garden—may well explainthe gashed finger)

Ginger to taste (optional)

1 tsp salt (reduce if your butter is salted)

Stir flour mixture into wet ingredients in 3 parts, alternatingwith

2 cups homemade chunky (or just any) applesauce

In the garden, we added some crushed walnuts to thetop. At home, we stirred in threecut up apples that were getting old in the fridge. In other words, add whatever you want.

Bake anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour depending on yourpan and oven.

If you feel fancy (we did), sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Share and enjoy.

Tucking in the beds

2011-12-01T12:52:00.001-08:00

As we prepare for the rain and cold, we are having a generalclean-up day. I’m recovering froma cold and should probably be tucked in bed, but I came anyway. Fortunately, Wild Child and I havestruck an easy truce as we fill the day with various physical tasks: weeding,mulching, cleaning out the greenhouse, and finally planting all the leekstarts. WC often tires of anygiven task, but I have found a secret: if I laugh heartily at his jokes (yes,the same ones that my son has come home and told me ad infinitum), he can stayon task easier. So he repeats oldjoke after old joke, and then, as we gently separate the little chive-sizedleeks from one another and nestle them down in their beds, he comes up with anew one. Which he then proceeds torepeat over and over, pleased with himself, until it is old. But the leeks keep getting planted, soI keep laughing. And I meanit. Because, really, we are happy.

Of course, I told him I’d post it so all the parents couldread it: “You know, when you are getting ready for winter you usually fill theleaks with patches? Well, we arefilling the patches with leeks!” (Big chuckle. Every time.)

Clean-up (Pomegranate/Walnut) Salad

It’s now or never for most of the lettuces, so despite thechill in the air, we are having salad today.
Harvest, triple wash, and spin the remaining lettuce in thebeds.
Cut open a pomegranate and remove the seeds. (You can cut it in half and bang itwith a spoon and they just fall out, wow!)
Toast a few handfuls of walnut pieces on the stove.
Mix up some olive oil, apple cider vinegar, and honey.
Toss it all together and enjoy!

Giving thanks: full circle (cut into parts)

2011-11-23T22:53:00.001-08:00

Who said a little rain could cancel pizza day, after more than a year of preparation by these kids? And by midday the sun came out after all, and the kids said this blessing before they sat to eat:

The silver rain,
The shining sun,
The fields where scarlet poppies run

And all the ripples of the wheat
Are in the pizza that I do eat

And when I sit for every meal
And say a grace
I always feel

That I am eating rain and sun
And fields where scarlet poppies run.

We ask all good blessings on our meal and on everyone.

How to Make Pizza

In the spring, collect a bunch of manure to spread over the plot you have double dug. Layer the manure, then cardboard, then straw, and water the whole pile weekly for four months.

In the fall, remove the straw and cardboard and add them to your compost pile, then dig in what's left of the manure.

Make some rockin' scarecrows out of old clothes and trashed CDs. Have fun with it. Try not to fight too much over the best accessories.

Scatter heirloom wheatberries passed down to you from the previous year's class over the prepped plot. Mark the field so people will know it's not just grass.

Watch it grow. Notice how much it shoots up when it rains. Check it at least weekly for 7 months. In the spring, see the slow toll of gophers, and the impression of the deer that thinks the wheatfield is a great place to sleep.

In the summertime, come by to learn to use a scythe and harvest the wheat.

In the fall (yes, the second fall), thresh (the doing-the-twist-on-a-pillowcase method is always popular) and winnow the wheat. Get a visceral sense of the phrase "separating the wheat from the chaff."

Grind the wheatberries. Make dough from the resulting flour (Mix 3 cups flour with 1.5 tsp salt. Mix separately: 1 package active dry yeast, 1/2 cup tepid water, a pinch of sugar, wait 5 minutes, then add 3/4 cup cold milk. Mix the dry and wet ingredients, add 2 Tbsp olive oil, and once it masses, let it rest 5 minutes. Then knead 50 strokes, rest 2 minutes, knead 20 strokes, cover and let rise for 1.5 hours or until you have the outdoor oven ready.)

Form into pizza rounds, load up with toppings...

bake...

and share.

Bless the food, and enjoy. Then go back to your classroom for a fractions lesson.

Time for a Break

2011-11-19T10:15:00.001-08:00

T calls in the morning, reminding me to bring the sack ofwheat I have at home from the summer harvest (part of a diversified grainstorage plan intended to minimize rodent risk). “Left it in the classroom at drop-off,” I tell her, justbefore getting into the shower. There’s an hour before garden class starts and despite the seeming follyof showering before gardening, I’m just that much in need of a shower that itcan’t wait. When I get out of thecomforting steam, my phone has two urgent messages from T: “Help! I left the cooked pumpkin and pierecipe at home. Do you have theJoy of Cooking? Call me.” And “Oh,and I somehow forgot the cream, can you stop and get two pints of heavy creamon your way over?”

I’m not worried about the pumpkin, as we still have severalmassive heirloom pumpkins sitting around, so we can throw another one in theoven. And pumpkin pie happens tobe one of the things I feel don’t need a recipe. I’m more worried about T, that the constant onslaught oftiny details and broad visions of what more we can do has worn her down to thisstate of exhaustion. Good thing wehave a week off for Thanksgiving next week.

Turns out, today she has the perfect pre-holiday class planned: pumpkinsgalore. The kids are tired, too,and restless, so it seems like a good day to be less ambitious than usual andjust enjoy the fruits of our harvest (or, that is, the vegetables).

We divide into two groups: half go to work on the pieproject and half make (fully compostable!) Thanksgiving decorations to takehome. And, lo and behold! Somehow, despite the fact that the pieprep wasn’t done as planned, we are eating it by the end of class, remindingthe kids of how they planted the pumpkin starts last spring.

So, along the theme of everyone needing a break, I will nowfail to wrap up a nice little essay and instead provide some pics of what abeautiful day it was. (And of course, the pie recipe.)

Pumpkin Pie

In the spring, as a last-minute afterthought to the cornplanting, plant some heirloom pumpkins along the edges of the cornfield.

When summer ends, discover that the pumpkins have thrivedfrom the thrice-weekly watering of the corn. Tenderly move the vines and drag the giant pumpkins awayfrom the tetherball courts that they have claimed as their own.

Load them up into wheelbarrows and share the harvest withall the faculty and staff who have supported the garden program. Keep a few for seed-saving and cooking.

Cut into quarters (halves would be too big to fit in theoven), scrape out the seeds (for next year) and pulp, and bake until soft. Scape flesh from shell and mash.

Beat three eggs, add enough mashed pumpkin to make two pies,mix with 3/4 cup brown sugar and a pint or so of heavy cream, a pinch of salt,and whichever spices the kids want to add (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger).For extra fun, let the kids put a fingerful of ground cloves on theirtongues. Make sure they have aclear path to the water fountain.

Pour into crust* a bake about an hour.

*School Garden Vegan Crust

Okay, you might be noticing that we are not so good withactual recipes. I think this mightbe great for the kids, as they see how you can improvise and be creative. On the other hand, I personally like tohave a recipe from which to work. Our pie crust started with an old Joy of Cooking recipe and morphed fromthere. The ingredient breakdownwent something like this:

2 1/2 cups whole wheat flour

a handful of blue cornmeal (adds a great nutty flavor)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup cold Earth Balance fake butter

6 tablespoons ice cold water

we would have added a dash of ground cardamom but we forgot

Cut the fake butter into the flour/salt/cornmeal with forksor a pastry cutter. Dribble inenough of the water to form the dough into a ball. Roll out as best you can (it won’t be as elastic as a whiteflour crust), then do your best to transfer it into a cast iron pan (or pietin). We had to do a lot ofre-assembly in the pan, pinching it back together. The lesson: pie doesn’t have to be perfect to be great. Of course, a pastry cloth or wax paperwould have made a smoother counter-to-pan transfer, but we use what we have,which is often our hands.

Pour in the filling and throw that baby in the oven. Do not do not do not fret that the kids will not like the whole wheat cornmeal crust. They will LOVE it. Really and truly, they did.

Off and Running

2011-11-12T08:38:00.001-08:00

The fourth graders used to seem impossibly grown-up. Now one of them is mine, and yes, they are impossibly grown up. For little kids. They are starting to learn fractions, so next week we will wrap up the loose ends of their 3rd grade farm year by threshing and grinding the wheat they planted this time last year. What does that have to do with fractions, you wonder? Well, when you thresh and grind wheat, you have flour. And when you have flour, and a cobb oven, you can make pizza. And when you cut pizza… fractions! And yes, planting wheat a year ahead of time does seem like the long way around to learn how to divide a whole into parts.

Then again, it might be a short cut to learning how to turn parts into a whole. How to turn a group of kids into a community, how to turn several bites of food into an understanding of soil enrichment (the horse manure I brought from our pony to prep the soil, real life poop in their shovels), pest management (scarecrows, amazingly effective), measurement & recording (how much rain fell into the gauge, how tall are our shoots this week), and time (in the classroom they do what-time-does-this-clock-say worksheets, the garden gives them a sense of time’s passage as they see their wheat sprout and change, watching the clock hands of their lives moving forward as the wheat and they all grow taller together). But that’s the fourth graders, and their pizza won’t be in the oven until next week.

This week it’s the third graders’ turn to plant their wheat, and to me it feels like I’ll blink and there they will be, big fourth graders, threshing and grinding. This convergence of planting and pizza have brought me to the predictable (yet always surprising) revelation that I can’t stop time, and my kids are growing older, and I can’t slow it down no matter how much I just want to keep them small enough to stay under the shield of my motherwings. “Slow down!” I want to yell, over the din of the third grade class negotiating with each other about which clothes and accessories will make the best scarecrows. (Scarecrow-making tends to be the class in which we dive headlong into intense social dynamics.)

Instead, I fall back on my usual “Walking feet please, walking feet” singsong, with which I remind them that there is a hard and fast No Running rule in the garden area (hey, we have knives and sharp tools AND slippery mud, we gotta draw the line somewhere). I am The Enforcer of such rules—“your mom is such a nurse,” they complain to my son—constantly making kids rewash their hands or return to their starting place and walk, losing their coveted place in line. They all know that I’m unlikely to cut them much slack in that way, always wishing they would slow down and stay safe.

So when my scarecrow group finishes their creation (I love these kids, because when they couldn’t decide whether it was a man or a woman and I suggested “transgendered,” they all just shrugged and said “yeah, that.”) and we are assigned to go harvest for today’s stir-fry, we all walk off across the playfield toward the beds behind the classrooms. Well, maybe there was some surreptitious skipping behind my back, but I didn’t see that; I certainly would have had to nix the joyful skipping if I’d seen it, so I kept my eyes on the purple bean vines we were heading for. Actually, we are not technically in the garden area so the No Running rule isn’t valid, but I’m not going to bring that up. Wild Child is in my group, and his feet are anxious ones, always tapping and shuffling, kicking wood chips and generally trying to escape the confines of their assigned space.

We pick half of the long eggplant-colored beans, leaving the rest for the afternoon group, then build a large pile of kale leaves on top of the bean bowl, and I let Wild Child harvest the lone tiny broccoli floret which has suddenly become the object of all his longing. The excitement of adding his own unplanned ingredient to the stir-fry is almost too much for his twitchy feet, and his wide green eyes turn up to me pleading, as we turn to head back across the wide expanse of grass to the garden. “As long as you stop at the garden gate,” I smile, taking the bowl of vegetables. And they are off, as if their feet have wings. Maybe my wings are getting too small for them already.

Autumn Harvest Stir-fry

Overheard, a monologue:“Stir-fry! Cool, stir-fry is awesome…. Wait. No, not stir-fry. I hate stir-fry. Yuck... Wait. What is stir-fry, anyway?”

The thing about this recipe is, well, there’s no recipe. Except we had pre-boiled potatoes to add in. Other than that, you just harvest what you have, chop it up, and sauté it. Add a little Bragg’s Amino Acid spray and voila, a garden meal. The garlic makes the whole garden fragrant as it cooks, and everyone is hungry, and they love it, a big bowl of vegetables with almost nothing else, and enough for second helpings.

This time we used: garlic, leeks, purple beans, kale, a tiny piece of broccoli, and the aforementioned potatoes. Wild Child’s instructions to me on how they made the stir-fry mostly involved a meticulous description of how you actually have to touch the kale to wash it because the water alone will not get the dirt off.

Harvesting Corn

2011-11-08T00:00:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the November Carnival of Natural Parenting: Kids in the Kitchen
This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama. This month our participants have shared how kids get involved in cooking and feeding. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.

Probably somewhere there is a poet who could or has put thesacredness of a school garden corn harvest into words. Mine come out melodramatic, in myattempt to capture the awe of the moment. Even Wild Child was radiant and smiling, proud of the work she did tohelp create our bounty of blue corn. This is how it went.

There was no farm machine, chugging down row after row. This work was in children’s hands, heldby grownups who love them, toiling in a space of reverence. Celebrating life, the giving thereof,the cycle of planting and growing and pollinating and watering coming around toharvest, to the action of taking down the sky-reaching plants, pulling off theears, and preparing them to dry. This corn has lived with and in these children for months already, andit will continue to live with and in them as it dries in their classroom inmonths to come. They will bereminded from time to time that the words the corn hears will enter into thecorn, and so they should choose gentle and kind words to speak, so that whenthey eat it they are not eating anger and meanness.

In the spring, they will grind it and shape it intotortillas and finally eat it. Their work will become food. The children will eat the corn, simplefood, a tortilla, and they will know in their bodies the months of work that ittakes to create such a thing. Theywill be at some deep level conscious of the history that goes into theirbodies. For they know that theirseeds were saved for them by the grade before them, and those kids’ seeds weresaved by the grade before that, and so on, year to year.

But the story of the corn goes beyond the school, so in thedigging of compost into hard soil, and in the planting of the seeds, and in thesummer-long watering, and in the raucous dance of shaking the stalks to ensurefull pollination, and in the scattering of corn meal onto the ground to giveback, and in the uprooting of stalks and the shucking and weaving together ofthe ears, the children hear repeated the story of the corn. The story of the people who grew it ontheir mountainsides on Mexico, and of the culture which the corn sustainedthere, and then of the influx of agribusiness and GMO corn; the story of thefear of the people that if they lost their corn, they would lose themselvesalong with it. And the story getslonger with each retelling, as it reaches toward the present moment of harvest,when children around the world are caring for this corn, the saved-seed corn ofthe people in Mexico who have asked for help in keeping their corn alive in theface of unthinkable odds. And thechildren hear themselves become part of that story.

It seems too great a story for them to bear on theirshoulders, and yet in the end, or at least where it ends this year, it is astory of fruition, of community reaching beyond geographical and culturalborders, of people helping people, of preservation, in its deepest sense. And perhaps this generation of childrengrowing into a climate-changing world has to bear too great a burden simply byvirtue of their age, but at least here, in the garden, we can teach them thatin their hands they hold the power to sustain life, and keep alive the seeds ofhope.

***

Visit Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama to find out how you can participate in the next Carnival of Natural Parenting!

Please take time to read the submissions by the other carnival participants:

Baking & letting go — Cooking with kids can be a mess. Nadia at Red White & GREEN Mom is learning to relax, be patient, and have fun with the process.
Family feeding in Child of Mine — Lauren at Hobo Mama reviews Ellyn Satter's suggestions for appropriate feeding and points out where her family has problems following through.
Children with Knives! (And other Kitchen Tools) — Jennifer at True Confessions of a Real Mommy teaches her children how to safely use knives.
"Mommy, Can I Help?" — Kat at Loving {Almost} Every Moment writes about how she lets her kiddos help out with cooking, despite her {sometimes} lack of patience!
Solids the Second Time Around — Sheryl at Little Snowflakes recounts her experiences introducing solids to her second child.
The Adventure of Toddler Tastebuds — The Accidental Natural Mama shares a few things that helped her daughter develop an adventurous palate.
A Tradition of Love — Kelly at Becoming Crunchy looks forward to sharing the kitchen traditions passed on from her mom and has already found several ways to involve baby in the kitchen.
The Very Best Classroom — Alicia C. at McCrenshaw's Newest Thoughts reveals how her kitchen is more than a place to make food - it's a classroom!
Raising Little Chefs — Chef Mike guest posts on Natural Parents Network about how he went from a guy who couldn't cook to a chef who wanted to teach his boys to know how the food we love is made.
In the Kitchen with my kids — Isil at Smiling like Sunshine shares a delicious soup recipe that her kids love.
Papa, the Pancake Artist — Papa's making an incredible breakfast over at Our Mindful Life.
Kids won't eat salad? Try this one! — Tat at Mum in Search is sharing her children's favourite salad recipe.
Recipe For a Great Relationship — Cooking with kids is about feeding hearts as well as bellies, writes Hannah at Wild Parenting.
The Ritual of Mealtimes — Syenna at Gently Parenting Twins writes about the significance of mealtimes in her family’s daily rhythm.
Kid, Meet Food. Food, Kid. — Alburnet at What's Next? panicks about passing on her food "issues" to her offspring.
Growing Up in the Kitchen — Cassie at There's a Pickle in My Life shares how her son is growing up in the kitchen.
Harvesting Corn and History — From Kenna at School Garden Year: The kids in the school garden harvest their corn and learn how much history grows in their food.
My Guiding Principles for Teaching my Child about Food — Tree at Mom Grooves uses these guiding principles to give her daughter a love of good food and an understanding of nutrition as well as to empower her to make the best choices for her body.
Kitchen Control — Amanda at Let's Take the Metro writes about her struggles to relinquish control in the kitchen to her children.
Food — Emma at Your Fonder Heart lets her seven month old teach her how to feed a baby.
Kitchen Fun? — Adrienne at Mommying My Way questions how much fun she can have in a non-functional kitchen, while trying to remain positive about the blessings of cooking for her family.
Kitchen Adventures — Erica at ChildOrganics shares fun ways to connect with your kids in the kitchen.
Kids in the Kitchen: Finding the Right Tools — Melissa at Vibrant Wanderings shares some of her favorite child-sized kitchen gadgets and where to find them.
The Kitchen Classroom — Laura at Authentic Parenting knows that everything your kids want to learn is at the end of the ladle.
Kids in the Kitchen — Luschka from Diary of a First Child talks about the role of the kitchen in family communication and shares fun kitchen activities for the under two.
Our Kitchen is an Unschooling Classroom. — Terri at Child of the Nature Isle explores the many ways her kitchen has become a rich environment for learning.
Montessori-Inspired Food Preparation for Preschoolers — Deb Chitwood at Living Montessori Now shares lots of resources for using Montessori food preparation activities for young children in the kitchen.
My Little Healthy Eater — Christine at African Babies Don't Cry shares her research on what is the best first food for babies, and includes a healthy and yummy breakfast recipe.
Two Boys and Papa in the Kitchen: Recipe for Disaster? — MudpieMama shares all about her fears, joys and discoveries when the boys and handsome hubby took over the kitchen.
Food choices, Food treats — Henrietta at Angel Wings and Herb Tea shares her family's relationship with food.
learning to eat — Catherine at learner mummy reflects on little M's first adventures with food.
The Night My 7-Year-Old Made Dinner — Melodie at Breastfeeding Moms Unite! shares how her 7-year-old daughter surprised everyone by turning what started as an idea to play restaurant into pulling off making supper for her family.
Cooking With a High-Needs Toddler — Sylvia at MaMammalia describes how Montessori-inspired activities and a bit of acceptance have helped her overcome hurdles in cooking while caring for a "high-needs" child.
Kids in the Kitchen – teaching healthy food choices — Brenna at Almost All The Truth shares her belief in the importance of getting kids into the kitchen using her favorite cookbook for kids to develop healthy food choices now and hopefully into the future.
Make Milk, Not War — Tamara at Tea for Three remembers the daily food fights as she struggled to feed a picky eater.
teaching baby birds about good food. — Sarah at Small Bird on Fire writes about the ways in which her family chooses to gently teach their son how to make wise food decisions.
5 Ways to Enhance Your Baby or Young Toddler's Relationship with Food — Charise at I Thought I Knew Mama shares simple ways to give your child a healthy beginning to her lifelong relationship with food.
Toddler at the Table: 10 Creative Solutions — Moorea at Mamalady shares tips for preventing meal-time power struggles.
How My Child Takes Responsibility During His Mealtime... — Jenny @ I'm a full-time mummy shares how she teaches and encourages her 32 months old son on adopting good manners and responsibilities during his mealtimes...
Kids in the Kitchen: 6 Tips Plus a Recipe — Kristin at Intrepid Murmurings shares six tips for overcoming some of the the difficulties of cooking with multiple young sous chefs, and a recipe they all can agree on!
How BLW has made me a better parent — Zoe at Mummykins shares how baby-led weaning has changed her approach to parenting.
My Budding Chef — Jenny at Chronicles of a Nursing Mom is no cook but is happy that her daughter has shown an inclination and manages to whip up yummy goodies for their family.
Kids in the Kitchen: An Activity for Every Age — Gaby from Tmuffin describes how she keeps her kids busy in the kitchen, whether they are one week old or two years old.
The Phantastically Mutlipurposed Phyllo — Ana at Pandamoly shares how Phyllo is used to create enticing dishes at home! Anything can be made into a Struedel!
Kitchen Kids — Laura from A Pug in the Kitchen shares her children's most favorite recipe to make, experience and eat.
Independence vs. Connection in the Kitchen: won't you please get yourself your own snack already? — Lisa at Organic Baby Atlanta wishes her daughter would just go make a mess in the kitchen. But her daughter only wants to do it together.
Grandma Rose's Kitchen — Abbie at Farmer's Daughter reminisces about her childhood and dreams of filling her kitchen with people, love, noise, and messes.
Healthy Food Choices for Kids — Jorje offers one way to encourage children to make their own healthy food choices at MommaJorje.com.
Cooking food to thrive rather than survive — Phoebe at Little Tinker Tales is trying to foster a lifetime of good food habits by teaching her children about the importance of avoiding junk, cooking healthy meals, and learning about the whole food process.
Evolution of a self-led eater — Sheila at A Gift Universe shares the story of how her son grew from nursing around the clock to eating everything in sight, without her having to push.
10 Ways Tiny Helps In The Kitchen — Jennifer at Hybrid Rasta Mama explores the ways in which her toddler actively participates in kitchen-related activities.
The Complexity of Feeding a Child — Feeding children a healthy diet is no straight-forward task, but Lisa at My World Edenwild shares some general guidelines to help your child thrive.
Lactation Cookies — That Mama Gretchen shares a fun recipe that will benefit both mamas and babies!
50 of the Best Books, Websites, & Resources to Inspire Kids in the Kitchen — Need inspiration to get your kids in the kitchen? Dionna at Code Name: Mama rounds up some of the best books and websites that can serve as a source for ideas, recipes, and cooking with littles fun.
A 4-year-old's smoothie recipe — Jen at Grow With Graces and her son set out to make a smoothie without the usual ingredients. She let him improvise. See how it turned out.
Independent Food Preparation (My Toddler Can Do That?) — Megan at Montessori Moments shares simple ways for children to prepare their own healthy snacks.
Follow Your Gut — Amy at Anktangle shares her philosophy about intuitive eating, and how she's trying to foster her son's trust in his own inner wisdom when he feels hungry.
A TODDLER-STYLE LUNCH + RECIPE — Manic Mrs. Stone photographs how to have messy fun during lunchtime with a helpful toddler.

Blood, sweat, and pears

2011-11-04T07:42:00.000-07:00

It’s a rare day when someone doesn’t need a band-aid in thegarden. After all, we have reallive plants! With sharpedges! Today we are cleaning upthe cornfield to prep it for next springs planting, which means uprooting theremaining stalk-stumps and gathering up the leftover leaves. Which are sharp. But the kids take it in stride, mostly. If it’s a hard work day like today, aleaf-cut can buy you some down time.

And today we are working hard. By the end of class, we adults are grinning because thereare actual beads of sweat visible on several faces, which means that althoughit is November, the asian pear salad on today’s menu won’t seem too cold forthe season. The kids have clearedthe field of corn detritus as well as leftover pumpkin vines and weeds, hauled several loads of compost overand dug it in, and sowed a peace sign* of heirloom favas surrounded by redclover to act as “green manure,” adding nutrients into the soil for next year’scorn to use.

Wild Child, of course, is ahead of the game, havingsecond-guessed the upcoming compost curriculum by spontaneously tunneling intothe compost heap and discovering the hand-burning hot spot in the center ofit. “Um, that’s called anexothermic reaction,” I mutter, knowing that he could care less. His hand is black and hot, and he wantsto show the rest of the class this amazing discovery. Soon, there are many, many hot black hands waving to theremaining kids to “Come and check THIS out!”

And then it is time to curb the enthusiasm as we have to dosome serious hand-washing before we sit down to eat. At the sink, choruses of “Happy Birthday” and the ABC songoverlap as the black hands become presentable again, a joyful round ofhandwashing tunes, music to this nurse’s ears.

Asian Pear-Mint Salad

Have about five kids each chop up an asian pear. Try to keep this task happening evenwhen one of the kids finds a live worm in her pear. Marvel at the variety of sizes of chunks that result.

Whichever kid finishes her pear first can squeeze the juicefrom one and a half lemons into the bowl of pear chunks.

Gather a large bunch of fresh mint, wash it, and let thekids remove the leaves, chop them up, and throw the mint in with thepears.

Add adollop of honey, stir, and you are ready to go, so the kids can go help withthe compost digging. The saladwill stay fresh until the cornfield is all prepped and hands are again clean.

*We adults had to have a mini-conference to try and rememberwhether the peace sign has a line all the way down the middle. We were dangerously close to sowing afava-bean Mercedes logo.

Harvest Time!

2011-10-28T07:11:00.000-07:00

When school is over, I need to leave. I tell this to the garden teacher. We’ve had a busy week so far and mykids need a chill afternoon at home. We are behind on homework, the house needs to be swept, there are dirtydishes on the counter from when we left for school this morning. And we are tired, so she says “goahead.” But as I gather the kids’backpacks and my travel mug from the kitchen, I look at the scattered stalks,the trails of dropped husks, and most of all, the big baskets of corn thatstill needs shucking, and I let it all go. I shrug the packs onto a bench, abandon the mug on a picnictable. I start gathering spilledears of corn into the baskets. Theteacher looks at me quizzically as I hoist up a basket and head out to thefield where the middle school kids are playing volleyball.

“There’s too much work to leave it behind,” I say. “Shall we watch the game as we shuck?”

There’s a reason that kids used to have no school duringharvest time. When the work has tobe done, it has to be done. Andyes, we live in a world where, if our corn rots because we didn’t shuck it soonenough, we can go to the grocery and buy fresh corn to eat, we can go to thefarm store and buy seed in the spring. But so much would be lost. (See next week’s post for more about the corn.) So we shuck, and all the little kidswho aren’t playing volleyball come over and learn how to pull back the husksbut leave them attached so the corn can be braided together and hung todry. And some of their parentsjoin in, and the work of the harvest gets done, by many hands.

Harvest popcorn

We don’t eat the corn we are harvesting today, not yet,though the kids all taste kernels. But it IS corn harvest day, after all, so the teacher has found (Bill’sFarm Basket, oh ye locals) the kind of popcorn that is sold still on thecob.

Thekids carefully separate the kernels from the cob—watch out! Those kernels jump! We pop it on the stove, then letwhichever kid is still hanging around the kitchen doctor it up with olive oil,tamari, salt, and nutritional yeast. And dig in to our corn harvest feast.

Sunshine Soup, with a few clouds

2011-10-20T08:44:00.000-07:00

Gardening is work. Teaching gardening is work. We all have to learn this lesson today.

The kids’ version: double digging the wheat field so they can get their wheat planted before the rain comes. Lots of days we do tiring physical work until we are ready to move on to something else, but today we actually need to finish the job so we are pushing through tired arms and some creative non-cooperation from Wild Child, involving multiple time-consuming trips to the water fountain. (Smart kid, he understands that it’s really hard to say “no” to a drink of water.)

My version: having to ask for help when the going gets tough in my brain. My arms are tired, too, but it’s my patience that gets the real workout. Wild Child is just riding that line today, almost almost almost crossing it but banking on the adult’s ability to absorb large amounts of disrespectful behavior. He knows perfectly well that we try our best to keep him here with us instead of in the office. An ecosystem can absorb and adapt to a large amount of toxic additions, until it reaches a tipping point and things start to die off. My patience, like a fragile salamander, is joining the endangered species list. So in the break between the first and second garden groups, I put out a call for help, and get some habitat restoration for my soul. We garden teachers hold each other like that, help each other restore balance: “Remember all he’s dealing with at home, remember how he has to hold so many things together, remember. And here, have some more mood-brightening soup.”

Sunshine Soup

Before class, bake a kabocha squash. Have a raw one as well, to cut into halves and have the kids scoop out the seeds for saving, before putting it in the oven to bake for the next group. Kabocha is one of those great secrets of the squash universe. Why oh why did we grow up eating only acorn and butternut when delicata and kabocha exist? The kabocha is, well, an ugly squash, like a splotchy green pumpkin, unless you are an heirloom vegetable geek, in which case you find it “gorgeous, luscious, stunning.” Seriously, we are vegetable geeks here, as the children do not tire of pointing out. But they also do not tire of sneaking little bites of the baked squash, which I pretend not to notice as they scrape the flesh out of the skins into bowls. (I do, however, make them wash their hands again, because I am a nurse and thus the obvious enforcer of hand sanitation.) After the first taste, Wild Child keeps insisting that “it is not squash, it is a yam,” never mind the thick green skin in his hand.

Meanwhile, have someone chop up an onion and sauté it till it’s translucent, add a pinch of salt, cover and cook on the lowest heat until you are ready to use it. Just before you pull it off the stove, stir in some curry powder. With group two, I let the kids take charge of the curry powder and we had incredibly spicy soup—they also opted to add some grated fresh ginger and press three garlic cloves in—but the class, despite my worries, LOVED it. I gave small “taste” servings first so we wouldn’t end up with a lot of waste (we thought it might be too spicy for the worms) but every single child came up and asked for more. The enthusiasm of the cooks, which led to the spicy soup in the first place, was apparently infectious. No stuffy sinuses after this class!

But to back up: to put the soup together, combine the squash flesh, a can of coconut milk, about 2 cups of water, and the onion/garlic etc mixture in a large pot. Heat, blend (one of those blendy-things you can stick right down in the pot is a lifesaver, as long as you don’t lift it up too high and spew scalding soup all over the kids watching), salt to taste* and serve!

*Group one didn’t curry & ginger up their soup and they wanted to add a lot of salt to give it flavor, but group two’s concoction hardly needed any at all.

Tossed Picture Day

2011-10-13T13:33:00.000-07:00

A half hour before we expect the morning group of kids to appear at the garden gate, the class teacher sends down a message that instead of our usual hour-and-a-half class time, we have only one hour. That’s 60 minutes in which to fit 90 minutes worth of lesson activities. Furthermore, the reason that the class will be cut short is that it’s picture day, and so presumably we are not supposed to get the kids as dirty and disheveled as we normally do. Thank goodness we did the baking last week (although the 6^th grade has filled our garden space with the smell of half-baked brownies; the finale to their solar cooking experiments).

Today is salad, and it’s pretty easy to do salad fast. The salad beds we planted at the start of the school year are ripe for harvesting.

Somehow, we manage not only to harvest, prepare, serve, and eat a salad, we also double dig a large section of the wheat field we will be planting soon (so they can have wheat with which to make their pizza when they are doing fractions next year in fourth grade), and start a crock of pickles!

Quick Salad

Parent alert: the kids begged for the salad dressing recipe. We called it “Caesar Salad,” but the dressing is not really a Caesar dressing nor did we use all Romaine lettuce. But we did have some incredible gluten-free croutons on the freezer that Caesar-fied the whole thing.

Squeeze one lemon into a bowl; then squeeze a clove of garlic into the juice. Let sit.

Harvest, wash, spin, and tear up a big bowl of lettuce.

Add to lemon and garlic, according to taste and preferred consistency:

Mayonnaise

Olive oil

Black pepper

Salt

Toss the dressing, greens, and croutons. Serve. See how quick that was?

And one more picture from today in the garden (it's Picture Day, remember?)

Crisp is in the air

2011-10-08T12:37:00.000-07:00

Was it just last week we were frantically making lemonade to cool down the kids? Today it’s just plain cold. Rainy and clean and… cold. I guess the plan to make apple crisp in the solar oven isn’t going to pan out under these heavy clouds. But thanks to the ongoing efforts of our previous garden teacher, we have a propane oven in the kitchen so we can be crispy rain or shine.

Wild Child’s moment of the week:

“I’m bored. Cutting up apples is soooo boooring.” Chop, chop, chop. Blood-curdling scream.

For the novice garden helper, the blood-curdling scream might bring visions of a blood-filled cutting board, a finger messily half-removed by the combination of the dull paring knife and third-grade energetic chopping. But I barely even look up. The scream seemed, well, not 911-worthy.

Wild Child has dropped both knife and apple on the table. “THERE’S A WORM IN MY APPLE!” she informs us. Loudly.

As if we haven’t been totally immersed in the removal of worm-damaged sections of the gleaned organic apples for the last half hour. Somehow, the possibility of an actual worm in the wormhole hadn’t occurred to her. This little white inchworm is actually very cute, a fact not lost on the other kids.

“Sorry sorry sorry for screaming,” says Wild Child sheepishly, as the other kids in the kitchen group launch into a rousing chorus of “Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds, seems to me, you’d stop and see, how beautiful they are.” The song belts out over and over as if someone pressed a “repeat” button on the third grade. But the apples somehow all get chopped. Loudly.

Apple Crisp (gluten- and dairy-free)

Rotate tasks so that at each moment, most of the kids are chopping apples, as that will be the bulk of the work. Other tasks: Squeeze two lemons into the apple bowl. Grease a casserole pan with non-dairy butter substitute. Make crispy topping. Task not to give to kids: periodic addition of brown sugar to both apple bowl and topping. Take it from me: handing any random third grader a bag of brown sugar is usually a bad idea.

To make topping (note: please substitute any and all ingredients for ones you like better or are not allergic to), put a handful of walnuts and a handful of hulled sunflower seeds into a large bowl. Hand a kid a flat-bottomed mug and have them use the bottom of the mug to crush the nuts and seeds against the bottom of the bowl. Then add handfuls of almond meal, rice flour, brown sugar, and a few handfuls of quick oats. Mix. Slice in a half stick or so of the butter substitute, and mash in with a fork.

Mix lemony cut apples with brown sugar according to your sweetness preference and the natural sweetness of the variety of apples you have. Stir in as much cinnamon as the kids want. Fill the pan with the apples.

Cover the top of the apples with the topping and bake at 350 of you have all the time in the world, or 400 if class time is getting shorter and you want to eat it sooner than later. Bake for an hour or until class is almost over, whichever comes first. Nod and smile whenever someone walks by the kitchen, because they invariably, without exception, say “Wow, that smells great.” Hand each kid a warm bowl of hot crisp.

Sun-baked Smiles

2011-09-30T11:44:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the kids follow the script without any prompting. Wild Child looks down into the bowl of fresh salsa we have just made and says, surprised, “There’s a rainbow in this bowl!” Couldn’t have said it better if I tried and tried.

Recipe for happy, happy third graders:

Try out the new solar oven on something easy: fill the pan with chips and grated cheese. (Yes, the garden kitchen has embraced nachos this week, since we have so many many ripe tomatoes perfect for salsa.) Get as excited as the kids when the cheese melts!

School Garden Salsa:

Harvest every tomato you can find on campus (mostly cherries). Have everyone smell their yummy sunsoaked hands. Wash them (tomatoes and hands). Have one kid peel and press three humongous cloves of heirloom German garlic. Have the bravest kid peel and chop half a purple onion. Talk about the exciting cascade of chemical reactions that make people cry when an onion is cut until the kids are all debating the difference between the word “nerd” and the word “geek.” Get the hint.

Meanwhile, two kids can be hard at work chopping the tomatoes, which, given that we have only “kid-safe” knives, is no easy task. The straggler can chop a handful of parsley (Well, there was no cilantro around, and they honestly could have cared less). Trade jobs as often as needed to get all the tomatoes chopped and the onion in tiny tiny pieces that won’t make anyone revolt.

Chop into micron-sized bits half a jalapeño pepper. Resist Wild Child’s pleas to take this task on himself. Instead, have him entertain the others with his exciting reenactment of last year’s salsa day, when you (after being beguiled by the beauty of the extra-hot habañero in the store) let the kids chop the peppers themselves. Your main memory of that day was the beautifully penned, overly polite note that came down from the office: “Perhaps in the future you could not let the kids put hot peppers into their eyes?” Wild Child’s version is a bit more raucous, involving lots of running around holding his eyes and screaming.

Mix everything with some sea salt in a big bowl and hand it to Wild Child to put on the picnic table while you pull the nachos out of the very hot sun oven. Smile when he gets his line just right.

Anti-pesto

2011-09-23T15:26:00.000-07:00

Trying to get buy-in for the day’s activities, Tess tells the kids that after they get their work done, we’ll be having pasta with pesto made by the cooking group. Hands fly up.

Girl #1: I don’t like pesto.

Boy #1: Me neither.

Girl #2: I don’t like pesto, either.

Back to Girl #1: Can I have my pasta without pesto?

And so on. Who knew, it’s the anti-pesto table (okay, I admit it, pun intended).

I interrupt (a bad habit I am trying to break so I have to fess up about it): Do you guys know what the word “pesto” means? (Hmm, no, they don’t.) It means “paste.” It can be made of anything, ground up into paste. It doesn’t even have to be green.

They cock their nine-year-old heads at me, like, seriously? Are you crazy?

An hour later, every mouth is full. Of green stuff. With raw garlic in it. And who asks for thirds? Girl #1. (Gratification.)

Hand-mashed pesto

Before class, dry-roast a cup of pumpkin seeds (just stir them around for a while in a hot cast iron pan on the stove).

Have the kids peel and coarsely chop a half a large head of garlic. They each will have a small pile on their cutting board.

Then have them tear leaves off (prewashed) basil—they can tear them up small if they need something to do.

Pass the mortar and pestle down the row. Each one will add their piles of garlic and basil leaves, a handful of the roasted seeds, and a pinch of salt, and smash away. (You can drizzle in a bit of olive oil but too much will cause undue splashing.)

Here’s the cool part: between each kid, scrape the pesto into a large bowl, stir in a little oil, and let them all take a taste. The first taste will be “WAY too spicy!” from the garlic. Subsequent kids will adjust their garlic amounts according to preference, add extra seeds and salt, etc to play with the flavors. But keep adding each batch into the communal bowl and tasting. So, the first taste will be from just one kid’s batch, the second will blend two kids’ batches, and so on. By the end, everyone will love it. Magical, but true.

Add pre-cooked pasta (have some rice pasta on hand for the gluten-free kids) and serve. Make sure you have enough for seconds (and thirds).

SunRidge Garden at the Heirloom Expo!

2011-09-17T15:33:00.000-07:00

Pollinating the brain, with mashed potatoes on the side

2011-09-16T12:58:00.000-07:00

Jane, the ever-efficient scheduler of garden volunteers, is down here with me getting ready, adding pollinator worksheets into the kids’ folders before class starts. I notice she is getting about twice as many done as I am. “You are so efficient,” I say, admiring. “In this moment,” she answers, and then proceeds to tell me about some research she has been reading about brain function and how there is just so much more going on in our brains than we are conscious of. “So,” she adds, “this is one aspect: efficiency. I also have a totally inefficient aspect which wins out at times. Our brains have more going on than we can imagine.” As we continue our task of opening the folders, unfolding the metal strips, and adding the “choose a flower and draw it, with the pollinator who visits it most often while you are drawing” sheets, Jane illustrates her explanation of the brain’s vast range with a story from last week. She was with two girls, one of whom was afraid of bees, the other of whom was completely unafraid and pointing them out avidly, much to the distress of her frightened friend. Jane is trying, in some enlightened-adult way, to manage this dynamic and make the bees seem less scary, and in the course of doing so she says, “look, they are really all around us,” only to discover that her brain has suddenly allowed a shift in perception: in that instant she becomes aware of a swell of buzzing vibration around her and the air fills with bees, not newly arrived, but newly noticed. And she stands with the girls, allowing them all to feel the wonder of how our very lives depend on these tiny flying insects, and how they are ever-present, physically, here and now, and how we do not always see them even though they are beside us. Did I ever mention that there is magic in a school garden?

And the kids arrive, and draw their flowers, and dig out the potatoes they planted just before school let out for the summer, and peel gigantic sweet cloves of heirloom garlic, and stay past the start of recess as the potatoes took too long to cook, and they want their garlic-mashed potatoes. And we are all nourished.

Garlic-mashed potatoes

Dig up potatoes, all different varieties jumbled together like only a second-grader would plant them. Wash, peel, rinse, and chop into chunks. Carefully place potato chunks into boiling salted water. Meanwhile, peel and slice garlic. Sauté in a generous portion of olive oil and melted soy butter (vegan-sensitive class) until oil is fragrant (that’s when the kids start saying “Wow, that smells GOOD!”) and garlic is browned. When potatoes are cooked soft enough to mash, drain them, put them back into the pot, add sea salt and the oil/soy butter/garlic, and mash all together. Serve large portions and expect many to plead for seconds. Promise to give them the recipe.

Kinder/garden

2011-09-12T13:44:00.000-07:00

So relaxing, there is no need to keep the kids engaged, because in kindergarten gardening is an optional activity during outdoor playtime. Don’t have the patience to listen to an explanation? No worries, just run off to the monkey bars for a while. But return when you notice the gardeners are making a scarecrow with a school sweatshirt on. Stuff some hay in the sleeve, run off again. The kids who are into the gardening will finish it, and even plant some fennel in the bed by the back wall, each kid with a careful trowel and a turn with the watering can full of compost tea, each seedling welcomed to it’s new home with a drink and the easy love of a five-year-old.

Schoolyard pears:

Come to the back-to-school workday, and notice one of the tasks is “Pick pears and take them home.” Inquire. Discover that the pears are ripe and dropping and attracting yellow jackets to the play field. Have the kids help pick the pears. Take them home as instructed. Slice with one of those corer/peeler/slicer things that clamp to the table. Put them in the dehydrator a friend just handed down to you. When dried, stack them in jars, and bring them back to the school for the kindergarteners and office staff to snack on. Feel totally righteous.

End-of-summer squash

2011-09-07T13:49:00.000-07:00

Just a week ago, a friend called to say she had some yellow squash she would fix carpaccio-style and bring over to add to the supper we were preparing for her & her daughter. “Don’t make too much,” I warned, as no one here but me eats summer squash.” And I was right, the kids all tried to swipe the parmesan shavings off the top, shunning the crisp thin yellow slices below. But today, here in the school garden, there is a table full of kids with bowls of kale salad and sautéed squash, my own most recalcitrant veggie-eater seated smack dab in the center. And I might as well be flat on the ground, like my lower jaw is. Because he is asking for seconds of… you guessed it, yellow squash.

Kids love squash (really):

Have kids slice up squash. Sauté lightly with soy butter and a sprinkle of salt. Make enough for second helpings.

Watershed moments

2011-03-21T12:19:00.000-07:00

The twelfth rainy day in a row, and the school garden looks more like the school mudpit. What else is there to do but pull out the watersheds & wetlands lesson plan. Tess called us this morning, the parent volunteers, to make sure we’d all come prepared in full rain gear. I’m excited. Seriously, what could be more fun than tromping around in the rain and then playing with clay? I’d love to tell you more about how great it was, how the kids followed the waterflow around the campus, learned about the water cycle, and molded huge slabs of clay into mountains and streams flowing into wetland sponges on their way to the ocean. But, um, I seem to have missed even the parts I was present for: most of my attention was monopolized by Wild Child.

Wild Child doesn’t always have it so easy at home and lets us all know it by pushing the limits whenever he can. When your self-esteem is already in the toilet, you have very little to lose by getting sent to the office, and then you don’t have to try and learn anything. So we in gardening try very hard to keep drawing him in, to not let him drive a wedge between the adults and himself. Today, though, he’s at the top of his game. He calls out, disrespectful and off-topic, while Tess is explaining the plan for the day, reviewing the water cycle. Seated at the front of the classroom, he erases the board when Tess’s back is turned, draws his own pictures. I call him over to sit by me, rub his back a little. But he keeps escalating the behaviors, until it’s blatantly unfair to the other kids to allow him to stay in the classroom. Tess asks him to go stand outside for a few minutes until he regains control.

Next thing we know, the kids are complaining: Wild Child is waving his arms, distracting them through the window. I take a deep breath, head outside. Wild Child proudly proclaims, “I can distract from anywhere.” Another deep breath, trying to blow away my impatience and frustration. I take hold of his hands, squat down to look under the skate-punk fringe of hair he is hiding behind, and catch his eyes with mine for a moment before they glaze under a veil of unshed tears. “I know you like gardening,” I say. “Don’t you want to learn what Tess is teaching today? It seems like it’s going to be a lot of fun, and we want you to be part of it.” Almost under his breath, he growls, “Some of it, I like some of it.” He looks away, hiding his vulnerability in the corners of his eyes, trying to regain his mask of toughness. I keep hold of his hands, talk about how when I was in school, I didn’t always like parts of it, even lots of it, but you just don’t get to pick only the parts that you want. I’m not sure that I even have a clue what I’m really trying to say. Please don’t turn away from the gifts the world can give you, I guess.

He rejoins the class, tightwalking the line between staying and getting sent out again, seems like he’s signing on, and then I make a fatal mistake, I set a clear boundary: you have to put a raincoat on to go out with the class. So, showdown in the raincoat corral, he’s got both his hands firmly at his hips, ready to pull out guns ablazing. Tess senses trouble, and takes Wild Child under her expansive emotional wing for a moment. Wild Child re-emerges ready to compromise with an umbrella provided by one of the other parents. But he doesn’t really join the class. He remains twenty feet too far away to hear the lessons being explained as we walk, trailing apart, his own personal raincloud with him under the bright sunflower umbrella. When we return to the classroom, he makes it as clear as the raindrops on his cheeks that he’s not doing it today, and he is finally sent to the office.

I’m relieved, and I ostensibly turn my attention to the project at hand, helping the groups shape watersheds out of their clay. But my mind has gone to the office with Wild Child. He pushes my buttons, and I just don’t know how to serve him. No matter what openness I try to bring to him, he works against my best efforts. He’s just protecting himself, I know, with his “Hey, I’m way more comfortable if you just get the rejection over with” attitude, with his search for the shortest way to get the abandonment part done. I know, at least in my brain, so I resist his efforts, but then…do I just let all the boundaries that are established for the other kids be ignored? He pushes away, we try to pull him in, he pushes harder, I set a boundary, he smart-mouths, he gets sent out. Mission accomplished. He’s in his comfort spot of mutual rejection, he can relax and put his feet up. Aaarrrggghhh.

His classroom teacher has found him there in the office, had the usual talk with him, brought him back with apologies if not eye contact, and with a willingness to at least go through the motions for the remainder of class. Watching him, I want to shove my head through the chalkboard. Why can’t I reach him? He’s only nine. Can his armor really be this thick already?

I watch them all, bent over their work. They are so different than they were last year, even than a few months ago, when we were planting the wheat, now knee-high. They are getting older, beautifully, tragically. The ways in which they have bent to search for the light, to survive the force of the winds, are getting stiffer, more solid, their crooked stems weak in places. We stake them, tie them to us with soft binds of careful lesson plans, and good intentions, and well-meant words, and hope that it is enough, that they will be able to stand on their own by the time they outgrow us altogether.

10/19: Bringing in the Corn

2010-10-25T07:58:00.000-07:00

The corn harvest was so inspiring, it produced a true sense of reverence even in wild child. Here's a link to the photo album. Watch the slideshow to get a sense of the day.

10/6: Apple day (or, adventures in food preservation)

2010-10-09T13:17:00.000-07:00

Every year, one of the SunRidge families lets the third grade come and visit their apple orchard, taking over their kitchen and yard for the day for a variety of apple-related activities. All I know ahead of time is that I’m assigned to the canning group. Hoo, boy. Let’s just say that I’m a less than experienced canner, though I have managed to produce a few jars of jam over the last few years that haven’t killed anyone yet. Still, I don’t have the proper equipment, nor do I really know how to use it. And somehow, my mother’s knowledge of canning passed down to me only in the form of a vague fear that canning causes explosions. My rational mind knows that this is only if you are using a pressure cooker and its pressure release valve malfunctions, but I still have lingering malaise about the whole process, like, show me a Ball jar, and there’s a small part of me that ducks and runs for cover. And so, of course, I’m now expected to perform this potentially fatal task in close proximity to several Other People’s Kids.

In preparation for the apple day extreme canning adventure, I stop by the hardware store’s canning section to pick up some lids for the many quart jars cluttering up my kitchen. While there I grab one of those stainless steel funnel things that are supposed to prevent you from making too big a mess, or an unintended trip to the burn unit, as you transfer boiling substances from a large pot into a small opening. Just in case whoever is supplying all the other canning supplies: the pots, racks, and those funny tong things, forgets the funnel. And as I head to the register, I grab a “Blue Book of Canning” so I have a reference in case I don’t know, say, how long we are supposed to do what. I mean, risking my own kids’ health with possibly under- or over-boiled jars is one thing; introducing botulism to the entire third grade is something else altogether.

Fortunately, and inevitably, when we arrive en masse at the orchard, Tess has it all under control. There are to be four rotating stations: apple picking, apple pressing, applesauce making/canning, and apple cake baking. I breathe a sigh of relief to learn that not only does the other parent volunteer assigned to my station know a lot more than me about canning, we also don’t have to keep six kids at a time entertained for an hour solely with hot objects and substances. The canning is just the last step of the applesauce station; most of the time we are simply dealing with multiple sharp objects. No problem.

Tess comes and demonstrates Apple Cutting 101 for our first group. Unlike me, she has the forethought to encourage them to “never put your fingers between the cutting board and the knife.” Who knew? I don’t think I’ve ever cut the core out of an apple without holding it in my hand, but there she goes, showing those kids how to cut up an apple without endangering their digits. We also have these cool apple corer/peeler/slicer gadgets that clamp to the edges of the table and are way more fun and exciting than just using a knife and cutting board, so the kids clamor for their turns. And those gadgets produce long strings of peeling that would end up as compost if Wild Child didn’t start grabbing at them: “I want the worms! Can I have the apple worms?” thus turning them into commodities to be hoarded, valued, and continuously eaten throughout the rest of the day. Of course, the gadgets, in order to provide all this thrill and functionality, have numerous (okay, two) extremely sharp components. Ever-enthusiastic about my teaching responsibilities, I demonstrate the real and present danger of these blades by gashing through my knuckle, with a dramatic and convincing show of blood that continues seeping through bandaids for the rest of the day, a reminder to the kids to stay vigilant.

Somehow we do it, kids and parent helpers, we make it through an entire day of all-apples-all-the-time with the worst casualty being my bloody knuckle (good thing I wasn’t assigned to the juicing group, where I probably could have ground my fingers into mash). Quarts upon quarts of properly (no thanks to me) canned applesauce line up beside the propane camping stove, several pans of apple cake cool on the counter, a huge vat of apple juice sits by the press. There’s a large bowl of leftover cut-up apples for sauce that in the heat of the moment I volunteer to take home and finish up.

The kids are tired and full of apple worms, tastes of apple cake and the richness of a day taking their food from tree to table. We’ll save the applesauce for them to eat with latkes when they learn about Chanukah; the apple cake will freeze for serving with their play in a few weeks; the juice will similarly wait in the freezer for a time when we need a little reminder of our hard work and the earth’s gifts. I’m tired too, more than I realize until I get home and notice that my feet have turned into sluggish bricks of dull pain. I throw the leftover apples into a pot and cook them down into sauce, then feel entirely too exhausted to deal with the canning process, so I throw the sauce in the deep freeze with the cakes and juice. Cheating, perhaps. But then again, we managed to get through the day of canning without blowing up any kids, so why push my luck?

Lazy Mom Applesauce

Take a bunch of leftover apple chunks (peels and all) and throw them in a large pot with a little bit of water. Turn the stove on low, cover the pot, and forget about it for a while. Give it a stir whenever you wander through the kitchen. When it seems sufficiently applesauce-like, turn off the stove; briefly consider canning it and decide to not bother; take off the lid, and let it cool. When cool, place in a freezer-safe container and freeze. Any smallish amount that doesn’t fit into the container can be served to your own kids with their supper. Try to remember to remove the applesauce at least 24 hours before you need to serve it in December.

9/28: Digging

2010-09-29T15:55:00.000-07:00

Now that I’ve already spent a day “leading” the seed-saving group, it seems a bit late for me to be confessing that I don’t know what the heck I’m doing. Plus, it’s too hot to argue, or really to even ask questions. So off we trudge again, different kids this time, clippers in hand, small bowls and mesh frames and Ziploc bags all piled into the large metal bowls we’ll use to collect the dried blooms of the plants we’ve been assigned to, which is “all the stuff around the community room.” With each other’s help, the kids and I can recognize three plants which seem to be ready to give up some seeds: columbine, calendula, and yarrow. We clip and clip and clip blossoms into three large bowls, which we without much forethought leave on the ground in the sun as we clip. Wild Child keeps “gathering seeds” into her mouth from the cherry tomatoes growing nearby, which is the kind of thing I usually not only tolerate but encourage, but I keep trying to pull her back on task so we can get out of the scorching sun. Of course, once we have denuded the plants of spent flowers, our metal bowls are too hot to touch, and we have to use our shirts to hold them to run to the shade where we put them down & wait for them to cool off.

While we are standing around in the shade, mopping our brows and waiting for our bowls to cool, Tess and her group are digging holes and planting lettuce & chard starts in the sun-drenched beds over by the third grade classroom, sweating away in the sun without any hope for retreating to the shady garden to clean and package their seeds. For this hour of sweat they will be rewarded with a long spray of water, but not before Tess calls their attention to how hot they are, and how long they worked, and how much hotter and longer-working must be the day laborers we see in the fields all around our town. Food is work, she points out gently, then cools them all off with the hose. They romp in the rainbow spray, proud of their lush green garden bed.

In the meantime, we are shaking the small seeds through the mesh frames to remove the extra non-seed items, blowing on the bowls to remove the light bits of detritus (this, we discover, only works with the heavier seeds), and packaging them up—labeling them clearly as instructed with the plant, the date, and the grade who gathered them. Wild Child is having a hard time not tossing the bags around in a way that will definitely result in the loss of all the seeds if I can’t refocus his energy, so I lead the group down to check out the bed from which the cooking group has removed a snack’s worth of knobby fingerling potatoes, which places us within range of the hose. And no, they haven’t earned a cool-down like the diggers, but it’s so hot--why not?--I let them run back and forth a bit through the cool water. Wild Child double-times the others, somehow getting fully soaked while they seem lightly sprinkled.

Hmmm. So, we’ve gathered, cleaned (as best we could, given my total ignorance of seed cleaning, having to be taught to blowing trick by one of the kids), packaged and labeled our seeds, and it still isn’t time for the cooking group to give us our snack, but it’s too hot to head back out into the sun to look for more seeds. I mean, it’s not really too hot, but I’ll have a small rebellion on my hands if I suggest it, so I have them go get their garden journals instead. This seems like a good way to not only keep them occupied but to save them from a lifetime of embarrassing ignorance (like mine) about the plants around them. They now have paper and colored pencils, so I have them get to work drawing the seeds they gathered as well as the plants the seeds come from and will produce. They each choose one plant, and I encourage them to look closely at the plant, to really notice the shape and color of the leaves, the details of the flower. I make sure they each have a leaf and flower right there on the table next to them, so they can dig down beyond their impression of the plant to its individual features and gifts. And as they get deeper into the drawings, I watch them transform from generic leaf/blossom/seed shapes into carefully chosen colors, spidery or thick leaves, measured stalks, and attempts at scale for the seeds.

By the time we are done, the cooking group is calling us over for today’s feast: the fingerlings they planted last spring, fried up yummy, and in recognition of the heat, plates of cool cucumbers sprinkled with sea salt.

Vanishing cucumbers:

Have the kids slice up as many cucumbers as you want. Lay slices out on plates and sprinkle lightly with sea salt. Marvel at the way the kids keep passing them back and forth, eating more and more and more.

Fried fingerlings:

Plant a fat variety of fingerling potatoes in the spring just before school lets out. In fall, dig them up, have the kids wash and slice them, then throw them into a big cast iron pan with some olive oil, sea salt, and some of the garlic still hanging around from the harvest a few weeks ago. Cook until, well, cooked. (If you were really ambitious, you could chop up and add some kale, but probably the kids have enough to do getting the cucumbers ready.)

9/24: Sukkot

2010-09-28T14:42:00.000-07:00

The third grade celebrates the harvest through the Hebrew tradition of Sukkot, a festival which centers on (among other things) giving thanks for the bounty of the year’s harvest. In the field behind the garden, the kids and parents have built a temporary structure out of bamboo poles and tree branches, and decorated it with garlands. The whole class will sleep out in it, under the stars, in the wet wet dew, proving the beyond-what-they-teach-you-in-college dedication of their teacher. Parents are also welcome, though most have brought tents. As we gather in the evening, the Jewish parents in the class explain the Sukkot tradition and ceremony, and then we all join in a potluck feast.

The garden committee, diehards that we are, have requested that each contribution to the feast be grown by either the family or someone that the family knows, to deepen our connection to the food. The table literally bends under the weight of the food, the kids trading stories of what they have brought. On the part of the kids, there is great anticipation of the rabbit meatballs provided by the family that raises meat rabbits; the parents, on the other hand, mostly have our eyes on the gorgeous plate of figs brought by Laura, queen of a vast permaculture garden. And there’s a humongous vat of matzo ball soup, putting to shame my jars of pickled beets and marinated green beans. I made these Southern standards a week ahead, got the potluck imperative off my calendar for the week, whew. But then, of course, I made the mistake of asking The Percussionist (my third grader) if there was anything special he wanted to bring, so of course there I was in my kitchen the day of, roasting his acorn squash.

He was so proud of that one squash, the only one that survived my tendency to kill all winter squash starts through some essential neglect that I have yet to figure out. I mean, we plant the seeds, and we water them when we remember. Shouldn’t that be enough? But that acorn squash meant a lot to him, since it came from some seeds shared with us by his drumming mentor. He watched it grow all summer, and carefully protected it from gopher attack by balancing it atop a wire cage. I had pictured making it the center of a meal for the four of us, celebrating it. But instead I sliced it into enough pieces to share with the class and stuck it in the oven. My pyrex dish with its scraps of ungarnished squash is mortified that the only place I can find for it is next to Laura’s figs. I sneak it onto the table and slink away.

The kids load up their plates (brought from home, but of course—no disposable items!) with food, and settle into small groups to eat. The Percussionist ends up close enough to me that I can see his plate, conspicuously missing any squash. A glance back at the food table confirms my fears: the squash lies basically untouched. So, what’s a humiliated parent to do? Well, cheat, of course. I have actually already cheated on the squash, dotting it with local organic butter, and then at the last minute before it went into the oven, sprinkling it with a little brown sugar, something that to my knowledge, is not now nor has ever been locally produced. So all I have to do now is start a rumor.

I whisper to The Percussionist: “You didn’t try your special squash.”

Nine years old, he knows everything. “I know.”

“But I made it just for you, because you asked me to.” I mean, I know it doesn’t actually look that appetizing, especially in contrast to the gourmet figs, but… “And,” I add in a low voice, “I put sugar on it.”

The eyes open wider, the shoulders straighten up. “Sugar?!” Not that he never has sugar at home, but this meal is noticeably not so sugary, and we haven’t yet brought out the various (regular, regular with nuts, gluten free, vegan, etc) apple crisps we’ll serve for dessert. So, he’s off, getting a piece of squash with infectious if non-locally sweetened enthusiasm—the casserole dish quickly starts to empty. Mission accomplished. And I stop obsessing, so I don’t know if it is all eaten or some is fed to the worms, but at least I know my guy partook of his own personal harvest festival. Sweet.

Drummer’s Acorn Squash

Get some seeds from someone special to you, then nurture them enough to produce at least one bright orange acorn squash. Preheat oven to 425 degrees (or less if you’re not in a hurry). Cut it in half, scoop out the seeds, consider saving them and then decide to feed them to the chickens “just this once,” because you are running a bit late and have a lot to do and the kitchen is already enough of a mess. Cut the halves into pieces about 2” by 2” or whatever size you want, lay them face up in a casserole dish and dot each with butter, then sprinkle the whole thing with brown sugar (not too much, just enough to pique the interest of a third grader). Stick it in the oven, get dressed for the potluck, feed the animals, then, just before you leave the house, turn off the oven, pull the dish out and bring it along. Try to enjoy the harvest festival without worrying too much about whether you remembered the step of turning off the oven and whether your house is burning down. Leak the info about the sugar if necessary.

Laura’s Yum-ola Figs

If you prefer a more impressive potluck contribution, here’s Laura’s email to me about how she made her figs:

Sliced figs brushed with a mint honey water (dilute the honey a bit so it is in a liquid state, add minced mint, I used spearmint)
Bake @ 450* for about 15-20 minutes, or until they begin to brown
At this point I let them cool (more for time than method)
Then I stuffed them with a bit of feta cheese (mine was cow feta) and broiled them for 5-7 minutes
Then I placed them on large basil leaves ("lettuce basil" is what I used) for serving

9/21: Harvesting Abundance (Pear slices)

2010-09-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

You don’t notice the pears at first, camouflaged the same color as the late-summer fading green leaves. First, you notice the basket-on-a-stick pear harvester, leaning against the forked trunk. Then you look up, and the pears reveal themselves, one by one, until you can’t believe you didn’t notice this tree drooping with the heaviness of ripening fruit.

Today is harvest day, prep and decoration for the fall harvest moon festival. My group is assigned to the pear tree, tucked between the towering cornstalks and the herb mound dominated by sprawling mints. The kids’ enthusiasm for the removal of the fruit from the tree is difficult to reconcile with the need to g-e-n-t-l-y place the harvested fruit in the box so it won’t bruise. We are getting a lot of bruising. But we’re having fun. Maybe, once again, a little too much fun. Wild Child is balanced atop the not-so-new fence separating the garden from the neighbors’ yard, swinging the metal-clawed harvester over her head to reach the pears hiding among the top branches. Pears are flying through the air, tossed from the pickers to the packer. Tess comes over and politely reminds Wild Child that fence-climbing is not a safe school activity. Ah, right, I think. Just because I’m in full support of my own kids’ scaling of tall trees at home doesn’t mean I should allow complete chaos in the school pear tree. We’re not at my house, propriety is required.

Our group moves on to cutting up the bruised and buggy fruit, first to feed it to the worms in the worm box, and then, because they are asking if they can eat the good bits, for ourselves and for all the other groups. “But is there enough to share?” the kids are asking, somehow not connecting the giant bin of pears we have harvested with their hunger. This disconnect with the abundance of harvest was something a number of parents noticed at our last school “farmer’s market,” a monthly gathering at a local park at which classes can fundraise by selling food and crafts. For the first one of this year, we decided to let go of the fundraising aspect and just simplify: we’d bring excess from our gardens and anyone could take what they need, donations accepted but not at all required.

Used to the bake sale table of treats which require begging parents for cash, the kids kept returning to the baskets of apples and asking, “How much do they cost?”

To which the teacher would reply, “Do you want one? Take one.”

Unused to this approach, they would soon come back and say, “But how many can we have?”

To which the teacher would say, “How many do you need? If you are still hungry, take another.”

They were clearly baffled by this take-what-you-need idea. “But, how many can we have?” they asked again and again.

And so it went again with the pears on harvest day. There was a true abundance, heaps and heaps of pears, and we hadn’t even finished the whole tree. “How many slices can we have?” they wanted to know. “As many as you will eat.” So they sliced and sliced and carried plates back and forth to the other groups, maybe a bit off the harvest assignment, but slowly, slowly (“Can we cut up another one?” “Yes, as many as we want.”) getting into the feel of what harvest time means, a full belly, a richness of plenty.

How to serve abundance:
Pick a bunch of pears. Give each kid a cutting board and knife and have them slice away until they are satiated with the pears, with the cutting, and with passing out pear slices to their friends. Feed the cores and yucky bits to the worms. Pile the remaining pears up in a basket & use to decorate for the harvest festival, then save it for another class to raid later.

9/14: Back-to-School Bruschetta

2010-09-15T09:33:00.000-07:00

The kids have been back at school for a couple of weeks, but today is the first day that the parent volunteers will be taking the third grade through a full day of garden curriculum. We arrive a half hour before the kids, just enough time to get our assignments and for me to work up an appropriate level of fear. Last year Tess was the official, paid garden teacher. This year, thanks to budget cuts, she’s volunteering, just like the rest of us.

[Though she’s a far cry from the rest of us, with her deep commitment to this class in which she has no children. As much as I’d like to think of myself as someone with a passion for the gardening program, there’s about the same chance of me spending an entire unpaid day (plus) each week teaching gardening to a group of kids that do not include one of my own progeny as there is of there ever being leftover bacon in my house. The rest of us like the garden too, and believe that it’s important, but we’re here for our own kids. Or maybe I should speak for myself: I’m here for my own kids. Because as much as I want a garden program for the school, what I’m willing to pour the sweat equity into is my own boys’ classes.]

Anyhow, with Tess as a volunteer, though she still takes on the entire task of planning the curriculum and teaching the group, there’s an increased psychological burden on me. Before, I was parent, she was teacher, and I would gladly, willingly, gratefully defer all discipline issues to her. Disruptive kid? Look at Tess. Defiance? Go talk to Tess. Rampant rule-breaking? Defer all responsibility to Tess. But now, um, there’s no hired teacher in the garden, so I am going to have to step up and handle some of this on my own (gulp), which means (gulp), telling Other People’s Kids what to do, something I’ve never really liked doing, and am not so great at. Fortunately, Tess breaks the kids up into groups and I’ve got only five. Five Other People’s Kids. Yikes.

So, Tess divides up the groups, and tells me, “You’ll take the weeding and seed-saving group.” Now, I’m all into seed saving. As a concept. My attempts at it so far have mostly consisted of washing off the seeds I scrape out of a winter squash we are about to eat and throwing them in a drawer until spring, when I throw them onto a patch of garden with a bunch of other stuff “shotgun style” and hope something comes up after I toss the dirt around a bit. The squashes I have managed to produce in this manner have been less than impressive. Tess clearly has no concept of the breadth and depth of my ignorance. Terrified, I fake it: “Sure, no problem.” I look at the bowls and frames filled with screen that she hands me, and am about to ask, “So…what do I do?” when she turns away to give instructions to the parent volunteer of the cooking group.

Thankfully, my group has a garden bed to weed first, which is something I know how to do. Trowels to the ready, mates! Plus, we get to harvest these giant overgrown-past-needing-harvesting garlic, which have huge seed balls balanced atop their thick stalks—there’s really not any point in doing anything but temporarily surrendering to the throw-around-the-seed-ball game. We’re having so much fun weeding that one of the students from the cooking group comes over to ask us to pipe down. We respond by supplying the cooking group with more garlic than they could ever use for their day’s work. So there.

Alas, our weeding enthusiasm sooner than later flags, and it’s time for the second part of the lesson: seed saving. So, off we go, them asking questions, me alternately faking it or saying, “Hm, that’s a GREAT question. Let’s save that one for Miss Tess.” We manage to gather some seeds that look, well, like seeds, and feel pretty sure that we know what the plants from which we gathered them are, when it’s time for us to be back for the treat prepared by the censorious cooking group, and here’s the magic, beyond my group's love of having their hands in the soil, and their careful discovery of the way the columbine blossoms turn upside down to hold their seeds safely in little dried flower cups for us. The magic here is that I’m watching my kid, who will not eat a raw tomato at home for love or money, clamor with the rest for seconds and thirds of the bruschetta the cooking kids have made.

Back-to-School Bruschetta

Toasted slices of French bread (be sure to have some rice crackers on hand for the gluten-free child)
Tomatoes
Basil leaves
Garlic
Olive Oil
Salt

Have the kids pick, wash, and chop up a bunch of ripe tomatoes into small pieces. Make sure they do not include any fingertips. Take the garlic from the rowdy weeding group, peel and crush a couple of cloves, and assign either the most patient kid or the one who just loves to chop, or both, to hacking it—I mean, carefully, carefully slicing it--into tiny bits. Let the others chop fresh basil leaves, mix it all together with some olive oil and sea salt, and take turns spooning it onto the rounds of toasted bread (and rice crackers).

Make the kids all salivate madly while they have to think up gratitudes as they stare at the plates of bruschetta. When they have thanked the earth, sun, rain, and Miss Tess, let them have two each, and then count to make sure there are enough for thirds. If there’s not quite enough, pass around to the parent volunteers and take the rest up to share with the office staff. Encourage the kids to make more at home.