SunRidge Garden at the Heirloom Expo!

Pollinating the brain, with mashed potatoes on the side

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

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

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

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. T 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 T is explaining the plan for the day, reviewing the water cycle. Seated at the front of the classroom, he erases the board when T’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. T 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 T 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. T 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

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)

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, T 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.

T 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.