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).

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.