Grade 3 visits Greenstring Farm in Petaluma

Feeling the cabbage head for ripeness...


Today Third Grade went to spend the day working at Greenstring Farm on the eastern edge of Petaluma. Bob Cannard, longtime farmer for Chez Panisse, and Fred Cline started Greenstring in 2003.



The farm is large and has vegetables, orchards and grapes in production. The farmers and apprentices practice "competition control". This means that they keep weeds in check, but do not take the time to pull them out. Instead, they occasionally mow them to keep them from shading out the desired crop, but always leave the cut weeds on top of the soil as a mulch and instant compost. This mulch also serves as a carpet, protecting the soil from compaction during harvest.



Becca, an apprentice, lead us on a farm tour to see the worm bathtub, then to look at the fields of chard and kale. After that we did some weeding and radish harvesting, and fed the weed tops to the chickens. Finally, we harvested chard and kale for a salad before eating our lunch.

Many of our driving parents purchased beautiful produce at the farm store.

Feeding the chickens

Chard sunshade

A Local Medicinal Herb CSA!

Please help us to make Community Supported Herbalism a reality in the Bay Area by sharing the info below. Thanks for your support!

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Steadfast Herbs is now offering a seasonal medicine share. Your herbal share will arrive at the beginning of each season to help keep you balanced and healthy throughout the year. Each share contains seven hand-crafted remedies, information about the herbal medicines we’ve included, and tips and recipes for moving into each changing season. 

We hand harvest almost all of the herbs that we use, respectfully gathering the plants from our backyard gardens, community garden projects, and local farms.  Our remedies are crafted in small batches, using organic ingredients whenever possible, to create the highest quality local and seasonal medicines.

Cost for the share is offered on a sliding scale, from $80-$120 per quarter, with pick-up locations in San Francisco and Berkeley.

To sign up for the seasonal medicine share, or to learn more, visit steadfastherbs.com.

New York Times article on women in urban farming, NYC

Mother Nature’s Daughters

By MICHAEL TORTORELLOAUG. 27, 2014

Photo

Maggie Cheney, center, the director of farms and education for the food-access group EcoStation:NY, at the Bushwick Campus Farm in Brooklyn with Kristina Erskine, left, and Iyeshima Harris, garden managers.CreditErin Patrice O’Brien for The New York Times

If you wanted to find someone picking a fat tomato this week in the City of New York, you could go see Esther and Pam, near the kiddie-pool planterson the rooftop of the Metro Baptist Church in Hell’s Kitchen. Or Maggie, Benia, Iyeshima and Kristina at the Bushwick Campus Farm and Greenhouse. Or Deborah, Shella, Sarah, Kate, Rachel and Chelsea in the West Indian haven of East New York Farms. Or Kennon, Leah, Jennifer and Charlotte at the Queens County Farm Museum, which has been planted continuously since 1697. Or Mirem, Cecilia and (another) Esther in the converted parking lot outside P.S. 216 in Gravesend. Or Nick, Caspar and Jared, on a one-acre farm and orchard in Randalls Island Park.

Wait a sec. Nick, Caspar and Jared: Are those unconventional girls’ names now, like Kennedy and Reagan? Because if you’re looking for a farm-fresh tomato in the city this summer, you’re likely to find a woman growing it.

In recent years, chefs, writers, academics, politicians, funders, activists and entrepreneurs have jumped on the hay wagon for urban agriculture. New York now counts some 900 food gardens and farms, by the reckoning of Five Borough Farm, a research and advocacy project.

Deborah Greig, the agriculture director of East New York Farms in Brooklyn.CreditErin Patrice O’Brien for The New York Times

Yet city farmers will tell you that the green-collar work on these small holdings is the province of a largely pink-collar labor force. Cecilia, not Caspar. And they’ll provide the staffing numbers to show it.

This is where the speculation begins — and, inevitably, the stereotypes. Are women more willing to nurture their communities (and also their beet greens)? Are men preoccupied with techie farm toys like aquaponics? Is gender the reason the radio at the Queens Farm washing station is always stuck on Beyoncé and Alicia Keys?

More significant, if urban ag work comes to be seen as women’s work, what will that mean for the movement’s farming model, mission and pay?

Counting New York’s urban farmers and market food gardeners can seem like a parlor game: part math, part make-believe. Data on gender is scarce to nonexistent.

The federal 2012 Census of Agriculture isn’t much help. It suggested 42 farm “operators” in New York were men and 31 were women. But the census published data from just 31 city farms. (Under confidentiality rules, it doesn’t reveal which farms participated.) And its definitions fail to capture New York’s unique abundance of nonprofit farms and community gardens.

A “farm,” by census standards, is any place that grew and sold (or normally would have sold) $1,000 worth of agricultural products in a year. Yet surveys from the parks department’s GreenThumb program suggest that some 45 percent of the city’s hundreds of community food gardens donate their harvest to neighborhood sources and food pantries. Blair Smith, who compiles New York’s data for the U.S.D.A., explained, “Those are not farm businesses, at least from our standpoint.”

New York’s urban farmers — the people who actually work in the field — offer a sharply different head count of what you might call bulls and cows. Of the 19 farms and farm programs that contributed information for this article, 15 reported having a majority of women among their leadership, staff, youth workers, students, apprentices and volunteers. (Of the remaining four, one claimed gender parity and another hired two men this summer from a seasonal applicant pool of 18 men and 30 women.)

It’s a snapshot, not a statistically rigorous poll. Still, the farms, from all five boroughs, represent a broad sample of New York’s particular growing models: a commercial rooftop farm; community gardens; and farms attached to schools, restaurants, parks, churches, housing developments and community organizations. The sample included two city-based farmer-training programs and two out-of-state sustainable farm-education schools and fellowships. These are the types of programs that mold future urban farmers.

Describing their own farms and gardens, managers suggested that women make up 60 to 80 percent of field workers, organizers and educators. Applicant pools are similarly unbalanced for summer postings, internships and certification programs.

Farm School NYC, an affiliate of the food-access nonprofit Just Food, “is 100 percent female-run,” said its director, Onika Abraham. But then, she added, “I’m the only staff person.”

More important, Farm School NYC receives 150 to 200 applicants annually for professional agriculture instruction. For this year’s entering 30-person class, Ms. Abraham said, “the breakdown for applicants was 76 percent women and 24 percent male.” (Applications for next year are open through Sept. 15.)

The gender divide appears to exist in salaried posts and volunteer work alike. For 18 years, Steve Frillmann has led Green Guerillas, which provides support and materials to more than 200 community garden groups. Most of these sites lie in central Brooklyn, Harlem and the South Bronx, and three-quarters of their volunteer leaders, he estimates, are women. So, too, women typically represent 75 to 80 percent of the applicants who want to join Green Guerillas on an AmeriCorps stipend.

It’s challenging work, and Mr. Frillmann, 49, is happy to hire whoever wants to do it. “To be honest with you, we’ve never really lifted and looked under the hood and tried to figure out why,” he said.

At the extreme, Edible Schoolyard NYC runs a food and garden-teaching program with two growing plots and a staff of 16. Sixteen of these employees are women.

Kate Brashares, 40, who is the group’s executive director, said: “It’s a little unusual we don’t have any men on staff at the moment. There are usually one or two.”

Ms. Brashares believes that the diversity of her employees should reflect the low-income communities where they work. That diversity includes gender. “We talk about wanting to get a few more men in the place,” she said. “It’s funny, we haven’t talked about it that much, though. It’s one of those things that just sort of happened. As we’ve gotten bigger, it’s gotten more obvious.”

Less obvious is why the discrepancy exists. Ms. Brashares speculated about the prevalence of women in education and nonprofit careers. But ultimately, she concluded, “I honestly don’t know.”

Photo

Onika Abraham, right, the director of Farm School NYC, at the Governors Island Urban Farm with Katherine Chin. CreditRobert Wright for The New York Times

Karen Washington has been observing the community garden scene for more than 25 years from her plot in the Garden of Happiness, a couple of blocks from the Bronx Zoo. She also organizes the Black Urban Growersconference and a long list of other food and neighborhood initiatives. This roster may explain why Ms. Washington, 60, is prone to make work calls at 10 o’clock at night, say, after teaching a class on season-extending hoop houses, or on the way home from running La Familia Verde farmers’ market.

Nowadays, she sees a cohort in her gardens that she gauges to be 80 percent women. “It was more 60/40 back in the early days,” Ms. Washington said. “Mostly Southern blacks and Puerto Ricans. They were in their 40s and they’re in their 80s now.”

Explaining the gender gap on a community garden level, she said, “a lot of it, from my point of view, had to do with the fact women lived longer than men.”

The stereotypical image of an American farmer may be a white man of late middle age captaining a $450,000 combine in an air-conditioned cockpit, high above a flokati of corn. But this profile is a poor match for farmers in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa — that is, the groups that often predominate in New York’s community food gardens. Nevin Cohen, 52, an assistant professor at the New School and an expert on urban food issues, points to a telling statistic from a United Nations special rapporteur: “Women are 80 percent of the global agricultural labor force.”

Many of the women who farm in Bushwick with Maggie Cheney possess experience in small-scale agriculture. They’ve long fed their families out of extensive kitchen gardens (as Colonial-era immigrant women did in New England). Ms. Cheney, 30, is the director of farming and education for the food-access group EcoStation:NY. And on the group’s two growing sites, she said: “I tend to work with a lot of recent immigrants from Africa, Mexico, Ecuador. And the islands: Jamaica and Haiti, the Dominican Republic.”

Ms. Cheney’s youth interns (five boys and nine girls) include the children of some of those immigrants. Yet wherever they were born, the youth growers at the Bushwick Campus Farm do not approach New York gardens as virgin soil.

Their fathers may have experienced farm labor as a harsh and exploitative activity, Ms. Cheney said. These men are not necessarily the easiest people to recruit for a hot afternoon of unearthing potatoes. By contrast, “I see a lot of girls interested because they may have that positive relationship to being the ones who cook in the family and buy the food in the market.”

She added, “The ones that I see, their roles at home are very gendered.” The politics of the New York “food justice” movement start at progressive and run to radical. But the connection between women and urban farming can appear traditional and even conservative.

Born and raised on the Lower East Side, Ms. Abraham, 40, recalls visiting her family’s black farmstead in Alabama. She said: “My grandfather grew row crops: cotton, soybeans and corn. He worked the fields. My grandma was home with a large vegetable garden and chickens.”

Put another way: “My grandmother grew the food; he grew the money. And I think maybe the scale of what we do in the city relates more to this kitchen garden.”

The Five Borough Farm project identified three commercial farms in New York, all of them sophisticated rooftop operations. Gotham Greens, for example, runs two (and soon three) climate-controlled hydroponic greenhouses in Gowanus and Greenpoint, Brooklyn. (Next stop: Jamaica, Queens.)

Of the company’s 50-odd employees, more than two-thirds are men, said the company’s 33-year-old co-founder, Viraj Puri. “At Gotham Greens, our approach is more plant-science and engineering focused and less ‘gardening’ focused,” Mr. Puri wrote in an email. He posited that this orientation may account for the different gender skew.

Beyond these few enterprises, the city’s farms exist not just to grow okra, but to advance a shopping list of social goals. These include recreation, nutrition, public health, environmental stewardship, ecological services, food access and security, community development, neighborhood cohesion, job training, senior engagement and education. We ask a lot of our gardens.

Mara Gittleman, who jointly runs the Kingsborough Community College farm program, at the end of Manhattan Beach, often sees urban farming likened in the news media to “the new social work, or this thing you do for poor people.” In response, Ms. Gittleman, 26, founded the research projectFarming Concrete to record and publicize the surprising yield raised in community gardens. These are vegetables that come not from the glittering glass on high, but from the ground up.

Be that as it may, if you’re trying to account for why so many college-educated women are attracted to urban agriculture, nearly everyone agrees that a social calling is the place to start. “Definitely, the most visible influx is young white people, and I’m one of them,” Ms. Gittleman said.

Photo

Kristina Erskine, a garden manager at the Bushwick Campus Farm in Brooklyn.CreditErin Patrice O’Brien for The New York Times

If urban farming were just about the crops, it would be cheaper and easier to do it 50 miles north. Urban farming, however, is not a solitary or single-minded activity. Along with the weeding and pruning, the job description includes sowing community interest and reaping grants.

Kennon Kay, the 31-year-old director of agriculture at Queens Farm, said: “What makes this farm different is the element of public interaction. We have over half a million visitors a year.”

The farm staff currently numbers two men and five women, which is actually a bumper crop of gents. And Ms. Kay takes pains to say: “I don’t want to knock the guys. They’re great.”

That said, in her experience, “Women have been extremely effective in multitasking, planning, communicating and being the representatives of this public organization.”

Inevitably, there’s an inverse to saying that women are attracted to work that involves children and the elderly, caring and social justice. In short, you’re implying that men don’t care, or care a lot less.

This is what you might call the men-as-sociopaths hypothesis (M.A.S.H.), and Nick Storrs, 29, who manages the Randalls Island Park Alliance Urban Farm, does not buy it. “I would refute the claim that guys are sociopaths,” he said.

Having cheerfully dispensed with that libel, he struggled to explain why men seem less interested in the social goals of community agriculture. “I don’t know, because I am interested in it,” Mr. Storrs said.

So where are the men?

“Wall Street,” Ms. Washington said (a theory that may not be inconsistent with M.A.S.H.).

The Bronx’s vegetable plots, she will tell you, are not insulated from what goes on outside the garden gates. “A lot of our men of color are incarcerated,” she said. “Huge problem. If you tell a 21-year-old man just out of jail to go into farming, he’s going to look at you as if you have two heads.”

Or in the words of Esther Liu, 25, a rooftop farmer at the Hell’s Kitchen Farm Project: “Men? Perhaps they want a living wage.”

The time has arrived, as it always does, to talk about money. The pay for community-based agriculture starts low and climbs over time to not much higher.

Ms. Cheney endeavors to pay her youth interns $8.30 to $9.30 an hour and the Bushwick farm managers $17 an hour. Farmers with longer tenure may earn $20. These are decent wages in agriculture, Ms. Cheney said. Yet they’re hardly enough to keep up with the climbing rents in a gentrifying neighborhood.

Deborah Greig, 32, oversees the crowded market at East New York Farms, leads the gardener-education program, manages dozens of youth workers, and cultivates specialty crops like dasheen and bitter melon. (And some 65 to 70 percent of her farm staff, apprentices and youth interns are women.) “I get paid $37,000 a year,” Ms. Greig said. “I started at $28,000 or $29,000, which was huge at the time. And I have insurance included.”

The permanence of the job, which she has held for seven years, is a boon to Ms. Greig and to the community where she works. Ultimately, Ms. Abraham, of Farm School NYC, argues that only stable employment will make urban farming viable for neighborhood women — and men — who lack the safety net of a college degree and family support.

For her part, Ms. Greig is probably underpaid. Don’t tell anyone, but she would do the job for less. “People don’t expect to be paid very much doing this work,” she said. “It’s a labor of love to a certain extent. I don’t think we’ve come up with a hard and fast model to pay people exceedingly well for doing nonprofit urban-farming work.”

Sounds like a job for the guys on Wall Street.

East Bay Urban Farm Tours Saturday, June 7

Urban Farm Tours in Berkeley and Oakland
Saturday, June 7th from 10am to 4pm

See what established home-scale urban farmers are up to and what is possible on a small. medium, large, or extra large urban lot.

You will see fruit & vegetable gardens, composting systems, rabbits, goats, bees, greywater and more, plus you will get to sample some of what these urban farmers are producing. Each homestead is unique in its interpretation and use of space. This will be a chance to ask questions about animals, gardening, techniques, greywater systems, rainwater harvesting, food forests, permaculture and more.

Click this link to see the tour sites.

Two funny birds

Frequently when I park my car in the back of St. Annes, as soon as I put the parking break on two small birds land on my side view mirror. I think they are male dark eyed juncos. I have no idea what they like about my car, but they spend time frolicking in the wind shield wiper well and flying from the door into the side view mirror on the passenger side. They fly so many times into the mirror that they actually soil my mirror with their saliva or feather oil.

Any ideas on what they are doing? I've seen this three times now.

Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder

If you've never read Ray Bradbury's short story, A Sound of Thunder, you definitely should. It tells a haunting story about how past acts effect the future. A butterfly plays a key role.

I was reminded of this story when I was walking to my car in the Trader Joe's parking lot and came across two butterflies resting in the middle of the asphalt. It's a miracle they weren't run over by all the parking cars. I picked each one up and brought it to the wood chips along the building. I hope I did my part for the future.

Sprucing up the patio

I'm sure you'll recall that we take special care of the patio at St. Anne's. We do this for the residents who cannot travel far beyond the building. Many of them come in their wheelchairs or walkers to sit on the patio and enjoy the view of the expansive yard. Around the patio we've planted edibles and flowers for them to enjoy.

Right now it's tulip season!

Lettuce for picking.

We planted two new planting boxes full of flowers: two poppies and one called Solar Fire. 

Wheat dew drops

I have often arrived at the garden beds to find the wheat starts each glistening with a drop of dew on the tip of their young green leaves. I chalked it up to the same dew phenomenon one finds on grass in the early morning.

However, today I entered the green house to find the same shiny drops of water on top of the wheat seedlings. The door had been shut, it was a comfortable temperature inside, nothing else was wet with dew. So what is really going on with the grass dew drops? Where do they come from? The atmosphere? The grass itself?

Does anyone know?

The Snircus

Years ago I visited a preschool called Kids Club in San Francisco that had two memorable things: a room completely full of mattresses and squishy pads for jumping and wrestling, and, an active Snircus. I had never seen a snircus before. It was a wooden container with several sticks standing up with twine strung between them. There was lettuce placed strategically along the twine, and snails were crawling up the twigs and across the twine to get the lettuce. It did in fact look like circus high wire acts.

I mentioned this a while back to Nashi (you'll remember him from an earlier post), and this fall he surprised me with a Snircus he and his dad built. We got the Snircus out today and filled it with snails and greens. The second grade Coyotes watched as the snails enjoyed their fun.

The Birdbaths

I've written in the past about our care for the two birdbaths at St. Anne's. Two years ago cleaning the birdbaths became the weekly job of the first grade. The children rotate through emptying the water, scrubbing the sides, and refilling them. This week the large bath looked especially nice.

Today the patio bath was the subject of our story from Adventure. I'll include it here. Adventure explained to us the significance of the duck, the rock, and the shell. 

Since the beginning of our year the birdbath group has had the job of cleaning out our second birdbath here on the patio. Last week Hannah and Anais did a very thorough and loving job. 

It turns out that Adventure heard another story that made all the difference this past week. The Black Phoebe had told her over dinner how the large concrete birdbath came to live at St. Anne’s thanks to the myserious and strong stranger who came to spend the night. This week, over dinner of squash soup and grilled cheese sandwiches at Ms. Beetle’s home, a robin told Adventure the story about this patio bath right behind you.

You see, the patio bird bath is not so much a birdbath as it is a museum. The robin told Adventure that the basin has been visited regularly by mysterious visitors who leave treasures behind in its water. The Robin and the other birds don’t always witness who comes, or understand why they leave the items they do. All the birds know is that the basin is a treasure trove of important mementos our residents, or others, have left over the years.

The robin shared stories about three of the items she does know with Adventure:

1) The shell. When this shell arrived in the basin it was the year 2007. I do believe some of you were born that very year. Well, the robin told adventure that when her great uncle first noticed the shell, it was resting on the side of the basin, just with one half of it beneath the water. There was a note attached that has long since disintegrated from the rain and sun. However, the  contents had been passed down in the Robin’s family for generations. The note read: “I found this shell on my 7th birthday on the golden sand of Ocean Beach. As a girl it sat on my desk and smelled of the sea. When I was lonely I picked it up and listened to the waves. When I went to college, the shell came with me and served as a book end on my shelf. When I got a job as a baker, it came to work with me and I used it as a scooping spoon for flour. When I got married I placed it on our dining room table to hold our napkins. When my children were young, they used it to shovel sand in our sand box. Now I am old and ready to leave my shell behind for others to enjoy. May it bring them as much use and happiness as it did me.”

2) The duck. The robin told Adventure that the duck was the first object placed in the basin back when her great great great grandmother was alive, nearly 8 years ago. The duck didn’t come with a note, but we know its story nonetheless. You see, the day the duck appeared was the day the robin’s relative flew to the patio to look for ants, and low and behold a mother duck and her babies were in the basin, swimming around. The water was clear, and the duck family was frolicking. My mother had no idea how the mother had gotten her babies up to the basin, perhaps they could already fly, but my grandmother said the babies were no bigger than a human’s fist. 

The robin spent much time that afternoon watching the mother duck and her family. The mother duck was teaching the babies to swim, to preen themselves, to watch out for predators. My grandmother noticed that whenever a hawk or crow would fly overhead, the mother would show her babies how to freeze, not move a muscle, so the bird would pass overhead and not be tempted to eat the tender ducklings. This went on for hours, the baby ducks swimming, cleaning their feathers, and then stopping cold when a predator flew above them. Finally, as the day turned toward evening, the great great great grandmother robin was called to her home for dinner. She left the basin sadly, waving goodbye with her wing to her duck family friends. 

When the robin’s great great great grandmother returned the next morning, she was startled to find a frozen duck there in the water. She flew to the basin, looking into the sky to search for predators. There were none, and when she reached the water she realized that the baby duck was stone, not a real duck at all. Puzzled she nudged the stone duck with her beak and looked at every detail. It was a perfect copy of the babies she’d admired, just not yellow as they were. There was no note, nothing to explain the stone duck’s presence in the water. The stone duck has lived in the basin since then and has continued to feel like a friend to us robins.

3) The rock: This rock looks like one of the stones along the patio by the roses, or a larger relative of the gravel that lines our pathways. However, this stone came five years ago to the bird bath, and it came from far away indeed. When you were little your parents might have heard the story of the French woman who wished to sail around the earth in her hot air balloon. This lady was brave indeed, and had set off from her home in France when she was 22. She rode alone in her hot air balloon, and did all the navigating herself. Hot air balloons are a funny thing. The hot air makes them rise of course, but one must have heavy weights in the basket as well in order to keep the balloon on the ground when preparing to set sail. Without these weights the hot air balloon would lift immediately and rapidly into the sky. The weights prevent, or slow, this process down. 

Adventure asked the robin, but what does this have to do with the rock? Well, the robin replied, four years ago this very brave adventurer crossed the Pacific Ocean from Japan and flew right over our heads here in the garden. When she was leaving Japan, she collected rocks to serve as the weights in her basket. As she lifted off Japanese shores she began to throw her rocks out of her basket to control the rise of her balloon. The more weight she threw away, the faster the balloon rose. Well, she got rid of every rock except one to make the trip across the Pacific. This was her lucky Japanese stone. She held it all the way across the ocean, fingering it whenever she got worried about her chances. When she finally saw land after 26 days above the ocean, she took her stone and threw it out of the basket to mark the good luck that got her to America safely. This is the stone she threw, and it landed with a plop in our bird bath. 

The robin told Adventure that the critters here at St. Anne’s come and hold and rub this stone when they need some luck. They think of the lady (who by the way did manage to float all the way across America and then over the Atlantic back to France) who turned her dream into a real adventure and took to the skies in her balloon.

So you see, First Grade, this bird bath is in fact a museum. Adventure  has been appreciating the objects and shares this story with you now, so you can keenly appreciate why it’s so important you do the good job you do. So, continue each week washing the patio treasure trove to keep our treasures lovely and their memories alive. You’ll see yet again how these stories do make all the difference.

Salamanders and Newts

I moved the fig tree today and discovered this little creature underneath the barrel. He or she slowly crawled away under the wet ivy, but the sighting prompted me to look up the difference between newts and salamanders.
First of all, a salamander is a whole group of amphibians that have tails as adults. Most have smooth, wet skin like frogs and tails like lizards.
Newts are those salamanders that spend most of their time on ground, as opposed to in the water. So, our friend here is a newt. Do you see how the newt's feet clearly have no webbing? That is a sign it does not spend much, or any, time in water.

Hiding. Can you find its eyes?

What Bird Is This?

Today the First Grade and I found a fledgling hopping around the patio where we have our lunch circle. It was cute and clearly just out of a nest. The bird got a good lesson when the children got too close for its comfort-it could fly! The bird had spent the whole morning hopping around and hiding behind the flower pots. But, as soon as the children approached, its wings knew what to do and it was off into the bushes. 

Here, two first grade girls look for it in its hiding place.

Gardeners at Home

Parents often tell me that their child demonstrated their garden skills at home or at a relative's house. I love to hear those stories as it really affirms the work the children and I do together at the garden. This weekend I received a photo of Nashi hard at work in his yard.

I enjoy hearing the children recount tales of how they taught their grandma to loosen the roots of her potted plant, or how they showed their father how to prune the roses, or when they selected some herbs for the family's salad dressing last night. Similarly, the children enjoy sharing with me all they learn from their parents and relatives about gardening. There are many grandparents in our community with bursting gardens. The children sure do love working side by side their loved ones in these inspiring locations.

If you have any photos of your gardener hard at work at home or on the road, please forward them to me. I'd love to post them here.

Wine Cap Mushrooms

For the first time in our garden program, we are cultivating mushrooms! We cleared two semi-shaded plots at St. Anne's and today the Third Grade Thatchers spread wood chips and Wine Cap spawn.

I've been storing the spawn in my fridge every since it arrived from Field and Forest Products. The spawn is a carrier (in this case saw dust) for the mycelium. Mycelium is the vegetative part of fungus. The whole thing resembled a large loaf of bread.

First the children measured the plot to figure out the total square footage. We only had enough spawn for 50 square feet, and luckily our two plots totaled 34 ft squared. Then, we spread many bags of woodchips down and measured their depth. We needed 2-3 inches of chips on top of the soil. Here you can see Elizabeth measuring the depth.

We needed to crumble the spawn before spreading it. It looked like bread crumbs and felt similar to that as well.

Next, we moistened the wood chips and spread the spawn, gently raking it in. 

Lastly, we added another two inches of chips and then watered both plots. Hopefully by late spring we'll have our first crop of Wine Caps!

Edible Education 101 Lecture Series 2014 at UC Berkeley

Edible Education 101

Apologies for getting this up late as the first lecture has passed. However, there is still an amazing line up of speakers on the topics of food justice and security.

See here for a complete list of speakers, their bios, and lecture dates and topics. Be sure to sign up for a free public ticket six days in advance of your chosen lectures.

Next up (available only by podcast now as public enrollment is full):

RAJ PATEL

The Green Revolution and the Economics of the Food System – February 3, 6:30 pm, Wheeler Auditorium on the UC Berkeley campus

A Sample First Grade Circle

Every Tuesday when the First Graders arrive, they come to the back patio of St. Anne's and are greeted by a small tableau of garden items on a blue silk. This week I had the sprouted wheat seeds that some of the children had planted three weeks ago. I gave a short mini lesson on why we sprouted them in flats (to thwart the hungry birds), and how to transplant them.

 In addition, I had a vase of New Zealand spinach to try. Every week we sample something edible from the garden. New Zealand spinach is bitter and flavorful, and oh so juicy. The children waxed poetic about its lovely beaded moisture on its backside. Technically these are called papillae. New Zealand spinach is happy along the seashore as well. I've spotted some near Ocean Beach.

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January in the Third Grade Garden

The Third Graders dug for potatoes today. We dug up at least 20 and three to four different varieties. We delivered them to the kitchen so the cooking group could add them to their soup. It was delicious!

Edith, a resident at St. Anne's who takes a loving interest in our work there, gave me a large bag of tulip bulb remainders. Most were very small, and some already sprouted, but we'll hope for the best. We planted close to 50 in the box by the library. We'll see what they produce!