Blood, sweat, and pears

It’s a rare day when someone doesn’t need a band-aid in the garden.  After all, we have real live plants!  With sharp edges!  Today we are cleaning up the cornfield to prep it for next springs planting, which means uprooting the remaining 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, a leaf-cut can buy you some down time. 

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

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

And then it is time to curb the enthusiasm as we have to do some serious hand-washing before we sit down to eat.  At the sink, choruses of “Happy Birthday” and the ABC song overlap as the black hands become presentable again, a joyful round of handwashing 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 even when 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 juice from one and a half lemons into the bowl of pear chunks. 

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

Add a dollop of honey, stir, and you are ready to go, so the kids can go help with the compost digging.  The salad will stay fresh until the cornfield is all prepped and hands are again clean.

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

 

Harvest Time!

When school is over, I need to leave.  I tell this to the garden teacher.  We’ve had a busy week so far and my kids need a chill afternoon at home.  We are behind on homework, the house needs to be swept, there are dirty dishes on the counter from when we left for school this morning.  And we are tired, so she says “go ahead.”  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 that still needs shucking, and I let it all go.  I shrug the packs onto a bench, abandon the mug on a picnic table.  I start gathering spilled ears of corn into the baskets.  The teacher looks at me quizzically as I hoist up a basket and head out to the field 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 during harvest time.  When the work has to be done, it has to be done.  And yes, we live in a world where, if our corn rots because we didn’t shuck it soon enough, we can go to the grocery and buy fresh corn to eat, we can go to the farm 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 kids who aren’t playing volleyball come over and learn how to pull back the husks but leave them attached so the corn can be braided together and hung to dry.  And some of their parents join 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’s Farm Basket, oh ye locals) the kind of popcorn that is sold still on the cob.  

The kids carefully separate the kernels from the cob—watch out!  Those kernels jump!  We pop it on the stove, then let whichever 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

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

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

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

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

Trying to get buy-in for the day’s activities, T 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).