San Francisco Waldorf School: Urban Farm and Garden Blog

Article on Shared Grant Making in the Chronicle of Philanthropy

2012-01-26T20:53:00.000-08:00

RSF Social Finance and the shared grant making initiative

Today RSF Social Finance sent a link to an article just published in The Chronicle of Philanthropy on the topic of shared grant making. The article summarizes our group process last February and illustrates how shared grant making is a powerful tool in developing new philanthropic pathways and outcomes for nonprofits.

The Waldorf School received our grant monies to learn how to better connect our students' work in the gardens to the residential populations at Laguna Honda Hospital and St. Anne's. Earlier entries discuss the research and programming that have grown out of this grant.

Sprouting Lettuce Seeds, January 18th, 2012

2012-01-23T21:22:00.000-08:00

The seeds are just beginning to sprout.

You can see a few poking their heads out of the soil. Initially I was keeping the seed flats at St. Anne's in our cold frame. However, the threat of a very hungry banana slug led me to bring them into my garage for safer and quicker sprouting indoors.

I have a simple set up with a "daylight" fluorescent light and a fan. I place the seedlings just under the light for 12 hours a day. I have the light and fan on a timer. The fan is important to produce hearty, strong seedlings. Seedlings that are grown without adequate light and breeze can often turn "leggy" and pale. When growing indoors, you want to replicate the outdoor environment as closely as possible, while still providing them the boost that starting the seeds indoors can bring (namely warmth for quicker germination time). For the sake of visibility, in this photo the seedlings are 6 inches or so from the light source, but ideally they should sit as close as 2-3 inches below it. Create a set up that allows you to either raise the light as the seedlings grow, or, lower the height of the items they sit on to keep the ideal distance between light and plants.

One other recommendation I have is to water your cell packs from the bottom up. I let mine sit in a tub of water, one inch or so high, until the soil is moist all the way to the top. This can take several hours depending on your soil's moisture retention quality. I find I need to repeat this process once every 5 or 6 days. It's a very thorough watering and doesn't disrupt the seed or young seedling with soil displacement that watering from above can create.

Planting lettuce seeds, January 12, 2012

2012-01-23T21:00:00.000-08:00

Lettuce Planting

Kindergarten 2 planted lettuce seeds for the garden when they came to St. Anne's in early January. In the Tower Garden, we have a smaller raised bed dedicated to salad greens. I like to have a rotating crop of lettuces here. Lately, the Third Graders have been harvesting several heads, primarily the Little Gem variety, to make salads for the residents. So, we need to get some more seedlings going to fill in the holes.

Dagmar and the children planted many varieties, several hundred seeds. You can see the cell pack here filled with dirt and beneath it, the seeds.

I like to plant a variety of lettuces. Here's a sample package for a trusted variety:

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds has an incredible array of vegetable and flower seeds. They have a close by store in Petaluma, called The Seed Bank, as it's located in an old bank right in downtown Petaluma. I highly recommend a trip if you're looking to stock up for your own garden. They specialize in open-pollinated, heirloom varieties from around the U.S. and in some cases, the world.

Resident Focused Garden Projects

2012-01-09T20:01:00.000-08:00

As I've mentioned previously, this school year our work in the garden is geared to better serving the residential population at St. Anne's. Recently the children have completed some projects that make it easier for the residents to enjoy the fruits of our labors (literally!).

The first grade replanted our strawberry plants that we got last year from Hill of the Hawk Farm in Big Sur. The strawberries now live in pots right on the main Jeanne Jugan patio where many residents can enjoy them, even in their wheelchairs if need be. The berries surround our lemon tree which also lives there.

On Friday the first grade heard a story from the Queen of Workenwonder that detailed a contest she held to find a place to plant carrots that would be safe from the disruptive behavior of moles. It turns out the troll's suggestion to plant the carrot seeds in pots won, and so we carried out the Queen's wishes by planting carrot seeds in pots.

This not only keeps the carrots free of roaming moles (a real issue at times in our garden), but also enables us to grow them on the patio where the residents can enjoy seeing the carrots come to life. Importantly, however, I reminded the students that one can't just plant any carrot in our medium sized pots, it has to be a small variety. We planted "Little Finger", which when full grown resemble an adult thumb. This led to a very interesting discussion about those little carrots one can purchase at the store in a bag. Some children thought those were a freshly picked variety of small carrot, but others knew that in fact those "baby" carrots are really just cut and polished bits of large carrots.

The Third Grade helped harvest and bag herbs for an herbal tea mixture this winter. Our tea contains nettles, chamomile, spearmint, peppermint, lemon balm and oregano. We grow all those herbs between St. Anne's and the Grade School Campus, but we don't yet produce enough of the mint, nettles and chamomile for all the tea we needed, so I made up the difference from Rainbow Grocery's bulk organic tea aisle. With our newly enlarged herb garden, next year we should be able to produce all our tea ourselves.

The tea has a lovely taste, and it now is available for the residents in the Ice Cream Parlor at St. Anne's. This is a nice room off the main lobby where residents and guests can help themselves to coffee, tea, pastries, and yes, ice cream.

Frittrasses: January 3, 2012

2012-01-08T21:14:00.001-08:00

Each time the second grade comes to the garden, I relay a story from Ms. Beetle. Ms. Beetle is a character that the children met last year during their first grade visits to the garden when they heard the Tales of Adventure. Ms. Beetle is a beetle of course, who came to St. Anne's to live after she lost her job downtown as a chef. She retains a keen interest in cooking and looking after her garden friends. Her stories for the children comprise a collection I've named The Memory Kitchen.

In second grade the children cook as part of their job rotation. Each visit they make something different, a recipe that has as its main ingredient something that in season from our garden. This week those ingredients are leeks and wild onions. The recipe actually comes from a book called Plenty by Yotam Ottolenghi, an accomplished vegetable-oriented chef in London. The title of Ottolenghi's recipe is "Leek Fritters", but I've changed the recipe's name to "Fritrasses" instead.

You can read the story behind the recipe and its name here. The fritters are delicious, by the way!

Happy new year, Second Grade!

Who, among you, likes to invent things? Who feels like they’re always full of great ideas for solving problems in creative ways? Well, I’m proud to say that I consider myself a beetle of big ideas and full creativity. Not only that, but as you might have guessed, I have a big heart as well.

Let me share with you one of the inventions I am most proud of: Frittrasses! You see, dear Second Grade, as you remember I’m sure, I used to work downtown San Francisco in a very fancy restaurant. I had a good life there, working hard, dining well, spending my days with my friendly colleagues in the kitchen. However, there was one little bit of sadness to my life while I lived downtown, and this was due to the fact that in order for me to walk from my home to the restaurant, I had to pass along many streets which were crowded with critters who had no home.

Yes, it’s sad to say, but there is a part of our great city where many critters just like me, or the common garden snail, the slugs, even some butterflies and moths, live out their lives without homes on the streets. If these homeless critters are lucky, they’ll bed down in a park, where at least they’ll find soft space among the greenery of trees and grass. But many of them are old and weak, and must lay their heads at night along the hard concrete, wrapping their bug legs around themselves or weaving a coat of slime to keep warm.

Nights after work I would pass these critters as they bedded uncomfortably down. On occasion I would stop to talk, to offer some company and a listening ear. I often brought food with me from the restaurant to share. One old stick bug, his nickname was Branch, he liked to tell me stories from his childhood, from the time when he was small and flexible, able to climb up any tree trunk and hide on any branch. I asked him finally what had happened to make his old body so bent and brittle. He told me that life in the city had been hard on him, and once, the tree he was hiding in had been trimmed, and he and the branch fell to the ground, the branch landing on top of my friend Branch. That accident left him crippled and unable to climb trees again. Imagine the difficult life of a stick bug who can’t climb trees!

In the mornings I often brought my friends hot cups of tea to make their start to the day more bearable. Daisy, an old lady bug with one broken wing, was usually the first person I saw. She usually slept in a crack near the wall of my apartment, trying to shelter herself from the wind. Daisy gulped her tea down and neatly wiped out her cup, handing it back to me so I could use it again. Daisy didn’t like to talk much, but over several years I learned her story. Daisy had lived her good years with 100’s of other lady bugs in the Botanical Gardens in Golden Gate Park. They fed together on plump aphids, played together on the rolling green lawns, slept in the sweet smelling shelter of the tropical flowers. One day, however, just as Daisy was about to settle down and start a family of her own, a large storm blew into town. Daisy had been out that morning, and was too late taking shelter in her normal garden spot. The wicked winds picked her up and carried her toward downtown. As the wind roared around her she held her wings open, hoping to ride the lashing breeze safely down to the ground somewhere. Unfortunately, she was not so lucky. The wind carried her at full speed into the side of a tall office building downtown, breaking one of her wings as it pressed against the glass. She fell to the ground and limped to safety, but has never since been able to fly off to greener places, and so does the best she can downtown.

As the winter holidays approached one cold year, I decided to do something for my homeless critter friends. I decided to knit them each a blanket with which to keep warm and comfortable. Unlike you, I had never learned to knit, and tried to teach myself how to work those needles and yarn into something wonderful.

I went at it for hours and days, and dear Second Grade, you should have seen me: all tied up in knots, yarn balls rolling everywhere, needles flying and poking my thighs, blisters on my finger tips, and nothing that looked even close to a blanket. Knitting was proving very difficult for me indeed.

I began to worry that I would have nothing to offer my kind, needy friends for the holidays. I knew what they needed: food and comfort, but my knitting was a complete mess and would prove hopeless as a gift.

I took to my kitchen and began to cook which always made me feel better. I had eggs and flour and spices and milk. I had just a few leeks in my cold storage. I decided to whip up some leek fritters for supper. The cooking process brought me great joy, and before I knew it I had six plump leek fritters on my plate just waiting for me to enjoy them. They looked like a little stack of yummy pancakes just sitting there.

The sun was setting as I began to feel full. I decided to take my two extra fritters downstairs to give to Branch and Daisy. When I got to Daisy she was just packing her things away near the crack, preparing to lie down for the night. When she saw the fritter in my outstretched hand, she took it with a smile and said “Thank you! This is wonderful!” I was just about to apologize that it was no longer warm, when I saw with surprise that she laid my delicious leek fritter on the ground and proceeded to lay her own body on top of it.

“Daisy!” I exclaimed. “Why, what are you doing? That’s meant to be your supper!”

“My supper!?” answered Daisy. “I thought it was a new mattress to lay my weary back.” She continued to lay on top of the leek fritter, with a contented smile on her face. “You know,” she added, “this does smell might tasty” and she leaned her head to the side and took a small nibble. “I’m eating my mattress!” she exclaimed with glee, “and it tastes so good!”.

I stood there not sure what to make of this. “Well, goodnight Daisy,” I said. “I’m off to see Branch now.”

“Mmmm, bye,” Daisy chewed and dozed, all at once.

When I got to Branch, I held out the fritter to see what he would make of it. He took the plump little pancake out of my arms and laid his right down on the sidewalk. “A green mattress” he sighed. “How kind of you. And it smells so good I could eat it!”

“Well, Branch” I replied, “You can.”

And this, dear Second Grade, was the beginning of my new food I call “Frittrass”. You know, half fritter, half mattress? Once I saw how much Daisy and Branch loved their frittrasses, I made more and more for all the homeless critters in my neighborhood. I noticed that each frittress lasted about three nights, before the critter ate so much of it that there was no soft part left to sleep on. I saw many frittrasses that were eaten into the exact shape of the critter’s body, so that it was still just barely a mattress.

These frittrasses were my golden deeds, dear Second Grade. I made frittrasses for as long as I lived and worked downtown. Here at St. Anne’s, we manage to find each critter a home, no matter how needy he or she might be. We all take care of one another in this garden, so I haven’t needed to make any frittrasses. But do you know, this holiday season I got my recipe out and made some to take downtown, for there are still many critters there who have no soft place to call home.

Dear Second Grade, I realize these frittrasses will be too small to keep your big bodies comfortable, so for now, I thought you could just make some for eating, in honor of this season of Golden Deeds.

Enjoy them, and please think about ways you can be of help to others in need.

Sincerely,

Ms. Beetle

2012-01-08T20:09:00.000-08:00

November and December, 2011

As Fall draws to a close we try to get as much planting done as possible so the new plants can take advantage of the wetter weather to come. One of our big projects was to replace our two year old straw bale bed. Two years ago we build a good-sized straw bale raised bed to grow various crops. One year it held a rotating collection of greens, the second year we planted grain crops there. Straw bale beds are made by lining up straw bales end to end to form the perimeter of the bed shape you desire, then lashing it together with wire, and finally, filling it with soil.

Our previous bed had lasted two good years before it started to compost itself and collapse. We saved that soil, turned the old straw bales into our compost piles, and made room for this new one. You can see Kindergarten One working on it here.

K1 also planted flats of favas and sugar snap peas, both of which do just fine in our mild winter conditions. Those seeds are now 6 inch tall seedlings and in the process of going into the ground in various beds both at St. Anne's and on the Grade School campus.

Second grade finished the work on our new, expansive herb garden (courtesy of the RSF grant monies), and K3 planted a stand of garlic. Now we need to sit back and wait for that rain to come!

A long standing tradition we have for the kindergarten gardeners, is to create a winter offering to our bird friends at St. Anne's. I tell a story each year about a lonely farmer learning that his bird friends are about to fly away for the cold winter months, and how he figures out a way to give them a going away treat to honor their friendship and provide much needed nourishment for their long journey.

As I tell the story, I make the pinecone bird feeder just as the children will do when the story is over. We are now in our sixth year of this gift giving, and as December rolled around I noticed a greater than usual quantity of birds hanging around, I think waiting expectantly for their feast.

Sure enough, as the three kindergarten classes made their pinecones, the children could see the birds hovering around the proceedings in the trees. The bird song was loud and excited. Once the children hung their feeders, within minutes the birds were on top of the pinecones, happily picking off the seeds and nut butter. The pinecones were all completely cleaned off within 2 to 3 days of hanging. When the children return to the garden in January, they will run around looking for their pine cone and be delighted to find it bare.

Pumpkin Fairy Houses, October 2011

2012-01-08T10:33:00.000-08:00

When the First Grade comes to the garden each Friday, they are greeted with a letter from the Queen of Workenwonder. Workenwonder comprises the grounds of St. Anne's.

These letters help connect the children to their roles and responsibilities at the garden. For example, the adventurous tale of Sir Trowel instructed how to properly weed the flower garden paths. Another story, told about an old sow bug, stressed how work can build community and self esteem.

On our visit before Halloween, the Queen invited the children to build pumpkin fairy houses for the garden fairies. You can read her letter below and see the stunning creations the children made.

Dear First Grade,

Today, my first grade workers, we honor our dear frisky friends, the garden fairies. I’m sure you’ve seen them here and there: the flash of color on a hummingbird’s neck, the sparkle of sunlight on a falling water drop, the spectacular green of a new leaf; the fairies abound and the beauty they bring to our garden here in Workenwonder knows no bounds.

Today is the last Friday of October and so it is the day the fairies look forward to all year. For it is the day they move into their freshly decorated pumpkin homes. It’s a tradition here in the Queendom, our gift to the fairies for all the splendor they bring to us each day.

The job of decorating their houses falls to you, first graders. Each group will decorate one pumpkin fairy home to make it comfortable and beautiful for a fairy to move in.

This is a surprise for the fairies, remember dear children. So go about your work quietly and with great focus. I’ve hidden the pumpkins around the garden so the fairies won’t find them until they are ready. Carefully follow your directions and you will discover your pumpkin hidden on our grounds.

When you are finished with your little home, we’ll take a look at all the others, and then, when you turn your backs and head to school, those fairies will delight in unpacking their little suitcases and making your pumpkins their homes.

Enjoy, and serve the fairies well.

Sincerely,

The Queen of Workenwonder

Intergenerational garden grant 2011

2011-12-30T21:49:00.000-08:00

Last February the SF Waldorf School's garden program received a grant from RSF Social Finance in the Presidio to study concepts in horticultural therapy and begin implementing best practices into our current farm and garden program at St. Anne's and Laguna Honda. Our goal is to better include the residential populations at St. Anne's and Laguna Honda in our farm and garden work which until now has been solely student-focused.

Our grant came as part of a satisfying shared grant making process led by RSF. SF Waldorf School was selected along with six other Bay Area agricultural activist groups to come together and cooperatively allocate $50,000 dollars in grant monies. You can read more about this inspiring process by clicking the article in the sidebar.

In order to begin my studies in horticultural therapy, I first spent time observing the activity therapists at Laguna Honda. For many years Laguna Honda has offered a therapeutic garden program for its residents. The therapists bring gardening activities such as seed selection, propagation and transplanting into the residential neighborhoods. There the residents gather in the common areas and participate in the various activities. Importantly, great effort is made to get the residents outside and into the farm and garden. The new therapeutic garden is first class with its multiple raised beds, friendly farm animals and easily accessed orchards and meadow.

I am also looking into Anthroposophically based residential communities such as Camphill and Fellowship Communities. These communities located around the world emphasize the healing power of work and social cooperation and service. Each of these communities is anchored by a substantial farm, and much of the communities' work revolves around producing food for the animal and human inhabitants. I had the privelege of visiting Camphill California in Soquel , as well as Camphill Copake, NY and the Fellowship Community in Spring Valley, NY this year.

I attended the national conference of the American Horticultural Therapy Association in Asheville, NC this fall as well. The AHTA offers coursework and academic journals and research into the best practices in horticultural therapy. Most of this work focuses the healing possibilities of gardens in institutional settings, such as hospitals, prisons, community centers, and schools.

In addition to these educational pursuits, I have used our grant money to purchase items to better serve the St. Anne's residents. For example, pots and soil so that we can begin planting edibles on patios where all residents can access them; a collection of herbs so that we can begin an herb processing program engaging both students and resident hands, and greater quantities of seeds so that we can more substantially share our produce with the residents and staff.

This January I plan to begin individual visits with the most infirm residents using herbs as a gateway to sensory stimulation and conversation about favorite foods, recipes and memories surrounding related scents and tastes.

The students participate as well in our new focus. In addition to the usual singing and greeting in the hallways, the first graders are transplanting edibles onto patios, the second graders are installing the expanded herb garden, and the third graders prepare and pass out food to the residents during their lunch service on Wednesdays. The residents love to taste the offerings from the garden (included so far have been tomatoes, apples, salad greens and herbal tea) and thoroughly enjoy conversing with the children.

Spring and Summer Reflections August 30, 2011

2011-12-30T21:06:00.000-08:00

Spring and summer in the gardens

Welcome back to school!

The school garden keeps turning up potatoes! Even in late August, in beds I thought had long been cleaned out by eager third grade diggers, I keep finding more and more potatoes waiting under the soil. I harvested several of the darkest purple variety. Their starchy insides were deep purple with clouds of bright white here and there. On another potato note, back in June at St. Anne’s the First Grade finished work on the new three-level terrace near the palm tree. With the help of a few dedicated parents, the children worked for weeks to terrace a small hillside - laying stones, moving soil, and then mulching it with compost. When finished, every first grader planted a variety of fingerling potato. These are small potatoes, shaped long and slender like fingers. Those potato plants went wild over the summer and are now dying back-just in time for the 3^rd grade harvest dinner this fall!

Peas are another constant in our San Francisco gardens. They like our cool weather and grow prolifically along a string or chicken wire lattice. We plant mainly the sugar snap variety, the kind where you can pop the whole pod in your mouth, no need to shell them unless you let them sit too long on the vine. We interspersed sweet peas with the edible peas this year for a burst of color and sweet scent. It’s important to build different trellis structures for peas and beans: peas like to grab on to twine or small stems of other sturdy plants with their tendrils. The trellis should have twine or wire running both ways, horizontal and vertical. Beans, on the other hand, don’t have tendrils. Beans like to follow a single piece of twine vertically, as if they’re climbing a fireman’s pole. They attach by twisting their stalk around the vertical support. Lateral wire lines would only get in the way of their spiraling action.

At the end of the school year each kindergarten class put in a tomato plant, complete with a very dramatic, slow-release fish head fertilizer courtesy of Bryan’s in Laurel Village. These tomatoes are doing well. We also planted half a dozen in pots on the patio for St. Anne’s residents to enjoy. The cool spring caused many of my tomato seedlings to develop an illness called blight. Blight is very common in cool, wet weather. Luckily none of them had gone in the ground at this point, so I was able to cull the infected starts. It was actually a helpful way for me to see which varieties were most resistant. The most robust varieties were Stupice, Black Plum, Northern Delight, and Camp Joy. These are all cherry to small in size, the most likely size to ripen in our SF summers.

At Laguna Honda we are witnessing the benefits of greenhouse growing in the hospital’s state of the art greenhouse. The inside is a jungle of tomato forests, cucumber walls, pepper and eggplant tables, and even sprawling watermelon vines. The greenhouse has opened a wonderful world of warm weather vegetable growing to us-a treat for San Francisco. I have never seen a cucumber growing outdoors like this one pictured here!

The students at St. Anne’s had the privilege this past spring to watch a Black Phoebe bird build her straw, feather and mud nest and then proceed to hatch and raise two young. The first graders were the first to discover the hidden nest one rainy day when a small group of them worked on a project in the protected grotto. They heard small peeps and cleverly detected the location. This nest, tucked up in one of the inner folds of the grotto, provided great pleasure for us as we watched the babies grow into fluffy fledglings. Those two babes left the nest before school ended, and I’m happy to report the mother Phoebe went on to lay another egg and raise one more baby in June.

We ended our year in the gardens at St. Anne’s and Laguna Honda with our thank you parties for the residents and staff. At Laguna Honda the high school students helped to wheel out close to twenty residents for an afternoon of animal viewing and snacks. At St. Anne’s, I invited the residents and staff of St. Anne’s and the third grade families who’ve helped so willingly in the garden these four years. We enjoyed food from the garden, garden-themed art by the residents, and the beautiful sounds of Ms. Christofferson playing her harp.

Just before school let out we secured a honeybee swarm for our new hive across the street from St. Anne’s at Tad Kinney’s home (Sam gd 6, Liza gd 5). The swarm originated in the backyard hive of a Noe Valley bee keeper. My daughter and I drove the swarm across town to Tad’s with the bees contained in a swarm box, basically a sealed card board banker’s box with some mesh ventilation holes. Rinat Abastado, our long time beekeeper, installed them with a gentle shake into their new top bar hive. As Rinat and her family moved north this summer to Sebastopol, Karmin Guzder has happily agreed to take over bee keeping for the hive. Ms. Guzder and I visited the hive in late June and were delighted to discover thirteen bars full of beautiful snow white comb containing drone and worker cells, as well as capped honey. The bees are thriving.

In August, Ms. Guzder and I thought we spied a queen cell on the bottom corner of the comb. Sure enough, days later the bees swarmed and with quick phone calls we were able to find a bee keeper to capture the swarm while it hung in a tree next door to the Kinney’s. That swarm now resides in our Golden Hive at Laguna Honda where they have settled in well despite the foggy weather of late. We feel so lucky to have two hives from the same robust bee family!

I’ve included two photos of the 3^rd graders working on their stunning 100 year old reclaimed redwood tool shed they built for the St. Anne’s garden. Thank you to Ms. Christofferson’s class, Chris Gate, Chris Larrance and Todd Oppenheimer for their time on this project.

I want to extend my gratitude to all my 2010-11 garden volunteers and drivers at St. Anne’s and Laguna Honda. There were over 35 of you who gave your time and energy to the Urban Farm and Garden Program and I am deeply grateful. Thank you. Also, a special thanks to our generous host facilities: St. Anne’s and Laguna Honda Hospital. Our school could not offer these programs without these partnerships!

Please contact me if you’d like to garden with us this fall!

Live Power Community Farm Trip

2011-03-31T22:00:00.000-07:00

Last week the third grade received an honor bestowed on them by Gloria and Stephen Decater of Live Power Community Farm in Covelo (Mendocino County), CA (www.livepower.org). The Decaters told the children that in their 27 years of hosting school groups, 10 groups per year, our 3^rd grade had experienced the most extreme weather to date. The Decaters congratulated our children on their resilience, strong work ethic, and good cheer throughout it all.

The Third Grade farm trip to Live Power is a transformative capstone on the children’s four years of gardening curriculum. The farm provides them with opportunities to go beyond the work we do at St. Anne’s, particularly in the animal realm. Under the guidance of the three apprentices Becca, Matt, and Kim, the children milked Bess, the dairy cow, sheared one of the ewes, and chased the cows and sheep out to pasture in the morning and into the barn at night. The children gathered eggs and fed the pig, and were in constant play with the two farm dogs, Sophie and Alder.

Throughout the wet and at times snowy weather , the children attended to the daily chores to support the life of the farm. In addition to animal care, the children mucked out stalls, wheeled the manure to the compost yard, built compost piles, split and stacked wood, baked bread, shucked corn and ground it into meal. There were nails to take out of recycled wood, brambles and branches to clear, and dishes to wash.

When we arrived Tuesday in the dry afternoon, the Decaters had prepared the two draft horses, Pete and Laura. After the children pet the horses, Stephen led the 3^rd graders in an exciting activity of working together to pull a sled. The children worked in two teams along the wooden yoke, pulling as one to keep the sled moving over the rutted pathway. As the teams gained momentum, other children would jump on the sled, and we’d count how many each team could pull. It was hard work as we adults found out on our turn!

Once we had tried to work as the horses do, Stephen hitched the two draft horses to the yoke and the horses pulled groups of children on the sled back and forth on the lane. The kids loved it and we were all amazed by how effortless the horses made it look. The children learned firsthand the meaning of horsepower and teamwork.

Each night we slept in tents and stirred at night to the hammering of rain or purring of snow on the fly. Our tents withstood the snow and rain pretty well, but it was hard to keep the water from pooling around the doors and sneaking in with the children and all their wet gear. The parents set up elaborate systems to ensure the tents stayed as dry and mud-free as possible!

Debbie Hopkins was our farm chef and provided us with delicious and plentiful meals three times a day. The kids clamored for seconds and thirds and particularly loved her soups and the fresh baked breads with honey. Ms. Christofferson and I are indebted to all of our marvelous and intrepid parent volunteers: Craig Appel, Hugh Molesworth, Chris Larrance, Peter Belanger, Joel Bleskacek, Lesley Fisher, Carrie Leeb and Debbie Hopkins. They were expert campers and loving caregivers.

The third graders delighted us with their enthusiasm, farm-sense, and general toughness. Despite the wet weather, our work warmed our bodies and our hearts throughout our stay on the farm.

November in the Gardens

2010-11-30T21:18:00.000-08:00

November in the gardens

The second grade Snails planted barley, wheat, and rye recently. This grain will go into their third grade harvest dinner bread next fall! Yes, grain takes a while to grow. We grow winter varieties that sprout now in the late fall and then stand still for a while in the deepest part of winter. Then, come spring, the shoots shoot up and by April seed heads are forming. The children who are around in mid-summer will come to harvest the grain. Then, just as we did with the current third grade, next fall the now second grade children will thresh, winnow and grind it into flour. To protect our seeds from the hungry birds, K2 will build a scarecrow this week and install it next to the grain bed.

We have one lovely sunflower still blooming in the garden, but nearly all the other summer crops are finished. This week we’ll remove the beans and collect more seeds from the older sunflower heads. We have garlic growing and several brassica varieties. Brassica are cabbage and mustard family plants, such as broccoli, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts. We need to get more lettuces going as well. Lettuce can be started in San Francisco year round.

The children are enjoying our gigantic leaf pile in the Tower Garden. We’ve been raking eucalyptus leaves all fall, and now we reap the benefit of jumping and burying ourselves in them. The second grade played a spontaneous rendition of “Old Roger is Dead” while burying their friends in the pile. Also in the Tower Garden the children continue to turn the beautifully large compost piles to speed up the piles’ maturation.

Have you noticed the wild onions growing around town? They are just now sending up their first green, ridged leaves. All of the plant is edible. The leaves are like scallions and can be chopped up for salad or stir fries. The bulbs can be cooked as you would a pearl onion. If you notice your gardener coming home with onion breath, this is why!

The animals are settled into their new home at Laguna Honda. The hair sheep and goats are friendly and line up for petting. Their bleating noises keep us company as we work in the gardens there. It is wonderful to have this important animal complement to our garden. A biodynamic garden relies upon the input of on-farm animal fertility (manure). A successful biodynamic farming system is a closed, self-supporting and even enhancing loop: the farm grows the food for all its animals and spreads the compost generated from their manure back onto the land. Happily we can now create that cycle at Laguna Honda.

I had the pleasure of attending a conference in early November located in East Troy, Wisconsin. This was a gathering of farm-based Waldorf educators. Garden teachers came from all over the U.S. to share ideas and learn from an active farm-school community there. Our SFWS program resembles the Chicago Waldorf School’s garden program in that we two urban schools must make use of available city land for our work. They garden on vacant lots and now within a community garden. Just as our programs include our residential host communities, theirs works closely with immigrant populations in Chicago. In East Troy we observed a farm school where there were groups of children building a fence, others clearing manure, and still another group cooking pork chops and apple crisp in the house for the group lunch. It was very inspiring to see the children busy at these important farm chores, especially in 40 degree weather!

Instead of a recipe this week, I encourage you to locate and cook with the wild onions. Ask your student gardener to help you find some around your home.

2010-10-31T21:00:00.000-07:00

October in the gardens

Oh the late summer of San Francisco! Just as the students and I had removed all the corn and tomatoes - stunted by the cold summer - and put in our fall crops, now the sun is out and days are in the 80s! Each year about this time I make a note to myself to plant fall crops in April and summer crops in August. However, I haven’t had the strength of courage to actually do it yet. Now, as I watch my kales and broccolis wilting, I am reaffirming the need to reverse those seasonal crops in our SF planting rotations. Corn in November anyone?

The flowers have done surprisingly well this year, despite the cool summer. We are now enjoying the process of saving seeds from our annuals. The edible chrysanthemums are particularly satisfying to harvest, a big seed head full of little rectangular seeds that jump into the children’s palms. We also have a wonderful collection of sunflower seed heads. We planted many sizes and colors this year and these flowers provide a perfect example of pollination. Did you know that a sunflower is actually a “face” comprised of 100s of tiny individual flowers? In order for seeds to form, each seed’s flower must get pollinated. It is fascinating for the children to see that within one sunflower head, perhaps only 50% of the husks actually contain true seeds. In addition to saving them for next year, we also enjoy cracking the shells open with our teeth and eating the seeds inside!

The first grade continues to enjoy a weekly chapter of our Adventure story. As a reminder, Adventure is the bee that escaped from our hive at the Kinney’s the night Rinat Abastado and I moved it to Laguna Honda. Adventure is alive and well in our garden at St. Anne’s, and is a wonderful character with whom I can introduce the children to the myriad of garden creatures that keep our garden vibrant: gnomes, various fairies, moles, worms, butterflies… While at work, the children often spy Adventure visiting our flowers. Such a sighting brings smiles to all our faces.

The third grade is threshing, winnowing and grinding the barley, rye and wheat they planted last fall. The children enjoy these processes and cherish the small drawer of flour that comes from all that manual grinding. Each week’s flour goes into the baked goods the third graders are preparing for their harvest dinner. Today’s group of Weavers was particularly knowledgeable thanks to their recent field trip to the Bale Grist Mill in St. Helena.

We have good news from Laguna Honda. The farm animals will move into their home next to the garden the first week of November. And better still, the residents will move into their new buildings on December 7 and 8. Please contact Mitch Mitchell or me if you would like to volunteer to help move the residents on one of these two days. It will be a large and joyous undertaking. As soon as the residents are settled in, they will start taking part in the daily activities of the garden.

At Laguna Honda Dr. Burket, Mr. Prado and the ninth graders started three large compost piles. The beans are sky high and our pumpkins are ripening. The ninth graders also planted garlic, radishes, and greens. The bees appear to be very happy in their meadow home.

Here is our latest recipe from the first grade and K3:

Fresh potatoes (ideally small ones, like fingerlings)

Boil until just tender and the skin is gently cracked open

Add butter and salt

Pop them in your mouth

September in the gardens

2010-09-24T09:56:00.000-07:00

by Amy Belkora, Gardening Program Director and Parent

What a relief to have the students back to their regular garden routines to help me propagate fall and winter seedlings, rake the fallen leaves, and pull the pesky weeds that are threatening to take over the gravel path in the pollinator garden.
I’d like to thank the Kinney family (Sam, Gr 5: Liza, Gr 4) for their generous hosting of our bee hive these last 18 months. At the end of August Rinat Abastado, our biodyanmic beekeeper, and I relocated all but one of the 50,000+ honeybees to Laguna Honda due to the Kinney’s impending remodel. Our bees are now happily settled in the Betty Sutro Meadow at Laguna Honda. We look forward to introducing a new colony at the Kinney’s in 2011. In the meantime, that one bee that got away has become the beloved subject of a story I tell the kindergarten and first grade children at the garden. Driving across San Francisco with a hive full of 30,000 bees puts an exclamation point on the need to drive safely!

On the topic of bees, there is a new movie debuting in Marin this October called Queen of the Sun, by Taggart Siegel, the director of The Real Dirt on Farmer John. Queen of the Sun takes as its starting point Rudolf Steiner’s 1923 prediction that in 80-100 years honeybee colonies would collapse. The movie chronicles farmers, scientists, and philosophers, and biodynamic beekeepers as they struggle to help the honeybee survive today’s colony collapse threat. One of the beekeepers featured, Michael Thiele, oversees the Melissa Garden in Healdsburg. This bee sanctuary is my inspiration for our pollinator garden at St. Anne’s. The movie will show Tuesday, Oct. 12 at 6pm at Cine Arts in Mill Valley and Wednesday, Oct. 13 at 7pm at the Christopher B Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

This summer Kacie Smith, Dexter Brightman, and I ran a week long summer camp at St. Anne’s. The children washed, carded and felted wool to make a felted goat’s milk soap. Dexter led the children in a cold frame building project so that we can experiment with cool weather seed propagation. On the last day of camp, Kacie brought her chickens!

During summer camp we dug into the potato towers where we’d been conducting the experiment on increasing yield. We took measurements regarding where we found potatoes relative to the ground and the top of the soil. My suspicions were confirmed as we found potatoes only down at the level of the first stem growth, just above where the seed potato had been planted, NOT higher up in the tower where we’d mounded dirt along the maturing stem. This disappointing result led me to plant the spring potatoes using a trench method at Laguna Honda. This was much more successful in creating a higher yield of tubers. The trench method makes it very easy to keep the stem underground where stolon growth occurs. The tubers form along the stolons, so, the more stolons the more potatoes.

To use the trench method, dig very deep holes, one foot minimum, and place a seed potato at the bottom. Barely cover the potato, leaving a visible crater above it. When the first stem and leaf growth appears, quickly cover that with dirt, again leaving a visible crater. Continue to do this until your crater disappears and the stem comes out of the flat ground. At this point, if you are quick to spot the emerging stem you can continue mounding, but I just leave the plants to grow at this point as there is enough potato growth under the soil already.

This trench method is a much easier way to ensure that the stems are kept growing underground and therefore will continue to produce the key stolons which in turn form the tubers. It is much quicker and easier to push dirt into a hole than to cart it over to shovel into to a tower. You want to make it as easy as possible to keep the growing stem underground. I’d love to hear any other potato growing strategies you might have!

Kale and Potato Stir-fry

Melt coconut oil in a large pot
Add chopped potatoes
Stir until just cooked through
Add chopped kale, salt and a little pepper and stir briefly until kale just wilts
Serve and enjoy!

March and April in the Gardens

2010-04-21T13:39:00.000-07:00

Amy Belkora, for the Gardening Program

Two full moons have passed since my last newsletter greeting. Sap Moon came in late February and brought with it the first signs of winter’s end: the pulsing of sap through the trees and the sweet harvest of syrup that it brings. In late March, we enjoyed Egg Moon. The children and I discussed the importance of Egg Moon. For some cultures eggs symbolize the universe in a microcosm-the yolk the earth, the white the galaxies that surround it. In concrete terms, the egg is an important nutritional rite of spring. It’s often the first bit of fresh protein a farmer gets in the new year as the chickens begin to lay with the lengthening days. To celebrate Egg Moon we’re making deviled eggs with fresh garden herbs.

We are also experimenting with potato towers this year as a way for the plant to grow vertically and capitalize on the potato’s method of growing its tubers above the original seed potato. Potatoes grow on stolons which are underground branches that grow off the stem. I’ve heard many growers say that when stems are covered by dirt, they produce more stolons, hence more potatoes. However, dissenting research shows that only very young stems grow stolons, and once the stem hardens off above ground from exposure to the elements no more stolons (and therefore potatoes) will grow.
The plants in our towers are quite tall now, at least three feet, and the stems receive more dirt monthly, so only the top 6-8 inches of foliage remains above ground. When the plant dies back this summer, we’ll dig through our tower and compare the yields to our in-ground planting. Stay tuned for the results!

It’s finally time to think about getting tomatoes in the ground. Tomatoes originated in South America and spread northward to Mexico and then over to the Mediterranean. Our cool climate is hard on these heat-loving plants. My tomato seedlings have only spent one night outside so far; otherwise, when nighttime temperatures are below 55, I ferry them outside for sunlight during the day, then back inside the garage at night. I’m growing my most successful varieties from last year: Stupice, Gajo de Melon, Black Plum, and Isis Candy Cherry. I’m also trying some new varieties: Snowberry, Mountain Princess, and Tigerella. The important thing for the cooler Western side of SF is to choose small fruited varieties so they have the best chance of ripening. Another tip: when you plant your tomato, make sure to bury a good portion of its stem below ground. All those little hairs you see on the stem will turn into roots and make for a stronger, healthier plant.

The children continue to work hard in the gardens. They are planting lots of seeds, maintaining our thriving raised beds full of lettuces, peas, turnips and radishes, and sifting the gorgeous finished compost we made last fall. The bee garden is a riot of color and bees. In particular the poppies are bright and ubiquitous. Our apple tree has blossoms and our fig tree is leafing out.

Here’s the recipe for the tasty deviled eggs:

Mix hard boiled egg yolks with mayonnaise and add chopped fresh herbs, such as wild onion greens, oregano, thyme, coyote mint, marjoram, a bit of rosemary. Stuff mixture into egg whites and serve.

February in the Gardens

2010-03-10T12:35:00.000-08:00

by Amy Belkora, Gardening Program

The moles have returned near the soil surface at St. Anne’s. This is always an exciting time. The children love the story of the mole and the gnome in the carrot patch. There is nothing more exciting than sticking our fingers down into the mole holes to explore. I explain to the children that the moles are always in the garden, but spend most of the year deeper down, where the soil remains moist and the earthworms live. However, when it rains, the worms come up, and so do the moles. We can see the cracked earth above their tunnel lines. Did you know that moles can tunnel nearly 20 feet in an hour?

Moles don’t hurt our garden plants, other than occasionally destabilizing the roots of our vegetables and grain. They are after worms and grubs, in other words -meaty foodstuffs. They ignore the greens. I am thankful not to have to contend with gophers. They love to eat plants and are famous for pulling down carrots and beets before farmers’ sad eyes.

One child made a wonderful discovery this month. He noticed a swarm of honeybees have taken up residence in a eucalyptus tree in the Tower Garden. I’ve shown each class the bees coming and going. This is a wild colony, in the sense that they were completely in charge of finding their trunk home, building all of the comb to their preferred specifications, using all of the pollen and honey for their own livelihood. It makes us so happy to host this wild hive, and we like to believe it is thanks to the new bee garden that we put in this past fall. Now our garden is surrounded by bees-those Rinat cares for at the Kinney’s, and now our new Tower Garden hive. What a boon for the flowers and seed production!

Hunger Moon shone in late January. This is the time of year when food supplies are very thin. I show the children a few potatoes, a garlic, perhaps another squash, and the funny, cold-loving celery root (celeriac). For snack the second grade makes a mash of these vegetables, and some groups crack walnuts to enjoy. I stress that in traditional times, this is the leanest month of all. In fact, Hopi peoples refer to this moon as Purification Moon. As Jessica Prentice writes, the Hopi turn the lack of food into a time of prayer, of intentional, conscious hunger. She also points out in her book Full Moon Feast (Chelsea Green Publishing) that the month “February” takes its name from the Roman Februa, a festival of purification held on February 15th. In our day, many folks still celebrate Lent this month, again an example of self-induced, spiritually-driven deprivation.

The third grade just returned from their exciting trip to Live Power Community Farm in Covelo. Look for our trip report soon!

Here is our recipe for those last items in the Hunger Moon root cellar:

Hunger Moon Mash

Peel and chop potatoes, squash, celeriac, garlic
Sauté in coconut oil or butter until soft
Mash together with cream if available. Salt/pepper to taste.

January in the Gardens

2010-01-27T15:18:00.000-08:00

by Amy Belkora, Gardening Program

The first and second grades have been learning about the Wolf Moon in late December. I am reading local author Jessica Prentice’s excellent book Full Moon Feast and sharing her knowledge surrounding the traditional Native American names for the yearly full moons. Wolf Moon was three weeks ago and now we’re fast approaching Hunger Moon.

Native people gave these names to the full moons as a way to mark the moon in relation to food availability and crop production. The Wolf Moon derives its name from the barren time of late December and early January when most parts of the US are covered in snow or chill and people are dependent only on the food they managed to save from fall harvests. It is a time when wolves are howling in their packs, distraught from hunger, coming closer and closer to human shelter.

I show the children examples of Wolf Moon foods: winter squashes, onions, garlic, dried herbs, potatoes. These are all foods that we harvest in late summer and fall and can store well into winter. The second grade enjoyed cooking a Wolf Moon soup of winter squash. See below for the recipe courtesy of Full Moon Feast.

In between rain showers we have been working to lay down a wood chip path among the native flowers in our bee garden to keep the pesky grass at bay. The first graders decided to unearth a two year old tall stump, the remainder of a tree that blew down two winters ago. This job has proven to be exciting and addicting. For the past two weeks each visiting class has had a go at its removal. Finally, on Friday the 15th, the First Grade Gnomes succeeded in wrestling it from the ground. Per Monique’s request, we’ll turn the stump into a nice perch in the garden.

The third grade cleaned up the school garden and planted a winter crop of potatoes. We placed them in a plot where we’d turned in grain crop residue three months before. Potatoes love to grow among green manure, in other words, plant matter that has been disked into the soil to add organic matter over time. We also planted several new radish varieties to enjoy over the coming weeks. Radishes grow quickly and well in San Francisco.

Wolf Moon Soup:

Coconut oil (or other oil, but the children love the coconut!)
Acorn squash (or other winter squash) peeled and chopped into small pieces
Minced garlic or onion
Fresh or dried herbs including rosemary, thyme, sage, oregano
Salt and pepper to taste
Vegetable or other stock

Sauté squash in oil until soft with herbs and onion/garlic. Pour in stock and mash lightly until soup is lumpy and hot. Serve with a dollop of yogurt if you like.

From the Gardens - Late Fall

2009-12-10T12:02:00.000-08:00

by Amy Belkora, Gardening Program

As we creep closer to winter and what we hope will be the rainy season, the children, garden volunteers, and I are hard at work wrapping up seasonal jobs. The second and third graders planted the grain crops. This year we planted barley, wheat and rye. Each of these will over-winter and be ready for harvest in summer of 2010. The kindergarteners are making their winter offerings to our bird friends.

The pine cone feeders gently hung just last week by K3 are nearly all empty of their seed, suet and peanut butter already!

The third grade also planted a stand of white garlic. We put in extra cloves so that come early spring we can harvest spring garlic, also called green garlic, and leave the rest in for full heads to develop by summer.

Two of the largest jobs since we founded our garden at St. Anne’s have recently been completed. At the request of the Sisters of St. Anne’s, we planted a pollinator flower garden on the western edge of our original space. This garden contains largely native plant species, shrubs, perennial and annual flowers. We received generous donations from Annie’s Annuals in Richmond to help round out our plant selection. I selected each plant to maximize its attractiveness to bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds. Our honeybees across the street at the Kinney’s house will be the primary lucky foragers.

Just before Thanksgiving several helpful families gathered to build a beautiful raised redwood bed for our new Tower Garden area. Chris Larrance (2nd) designed the box and supervised the building. I also want to acknowledge the hard work of Peter and Chloe Carlstrom (1st), Bill Brockenborough (2nd), Tony and Dahlia Martorana (1st). I could not have completed this project without them! In addition, we received a generous lumber and delivery donation from Beronio Lumber here in San Francisco. Several children have worked to fill the boxes with soil and we are now ready to plant. In addition to the wooden raised bed we are experimenting with straw bale beds and planting directly into compost-amended straw bales.

The First Grade Gnomes made their inaugural visit to Rose Hive last week. Rinat Abastado, our beekeeper, came to show the children bright white new comb, old comb with bee bread and a small amount of brood within it, and offered a taste of delicious honey. When we got to the hive, Rinat took the children near the hive in small groups to listen to and watch the bees’ comings and goings. As the year unfolds, each garden group K through 3rd grades will have a chance to learn about and visit the bees.

During these cold days the second grade makes hot tea for snack. We use a collection of fresh herbs: lemon verbena, yerba buena (a low lying, native mint-family herb that means “good herb” in Spanish and was the original name of the city of San Francisco because of its prevalence), lavender, thyme, and sage. To sweeten the tea, the children mash fresh stevia and place it in each cup. Then they pour the steeped herbal tea in and after it’s all drunk up, chew the stevia for a final delight.

Happy holidays!

In the Garden

2009-10-28T15:44:00.000-07:00

by Amy Belkora, SFWS Gardening Program Director

The third grade completed the harvest, threshing and winnowing of the rye, wheat, and barley grains. They harvested a big bed of potatoes and the remaining heads of garlic. These are among the ingredients for our Harvest Dinner on November 4th.

The third graders are quite fond of our Very Hungry Caterpillars which live amongst the green cabbage leaves in our school garden. Each group of gardeners carefully picks through the cabbage leaves following the telltale signs of the hungry beasts.

Usually we find three or four, and these go into jars (along with more cabbage to eat!) so that the children may watch the caterpillars turn into moths. Then, the cycle repeats itself as the children let the moths go right back into the garden where they lay even more eggs for the next generation of Very Hungry Caterpillars. Experiments like these are quintessential pleasures of an educational garden!

At St.Anne’s garden the classes have finished the preparatory wood chip laying at the Tower Garden and we now prepare to build the raised beds and several compost piles. Down below in the Home Garden, we have harvested the last tomatoes and delighted in digging up the leftover fertilizing fish bones underneath the plants. We have taken in the corn, eaten the summer squash, and harvested a miniature pumpkin for each class.

In the next weeks we will plant the native wild flower seeds and the bee-friendly plants in the western end of the Home Garden. Fall is a great time of year to start plants in the Bay Area: they establish well in the coming rainy season. We have an assortment of hummingbird and bee friendly shrubs and flowers, including salvias, monkey flower, members of the mint family, and native poppies.

I am recruiting volunteers to grow a stand of purple vetch at home. Vetch is a nitrogen-fixing cover crop. May Fair organizers will use the purple flowers and stems to create beautiful head garlands. After you harvest the flowers for the Fair, you can turn under the rest of the plant to add organic matter and fix nitrogen in your soil. Please contact me if you’d like some seeds to plant now.

Community Service: A Day at the Farm

2009-10-27T18:30:00.000-07:00

by Tabeetha Sun, SFWHS Student

Because of my involvement in the Waldorf High School Environmental Club, I chose to work at Alemany Farm for my community service project. The farm is collaboratively run by city officials and Alemany residents, but it relies heavily on volunteer involvement to maintain and harvest the fruits and vegetables.
Our high school group worked on a regular Monday for volunteers, which anyone can attend. We were given a tour of the site and saw dozens of varieties of edible plants. When the trucks arrived with their trunks filled with mushrooms, we had to cart wheelbarrows full of the plants to our planting site and sort them into their categories. As we were given a tutorial on the specifics of planting mushrooms, it began to rain heavily. During the process of clearing the ground, disinfecting the plants, planting and covering them, the rain continued to pound down but we didn’t stop even when we were completely soaked to the skin! Afterwards we were able to harvest any of the ripe produce grown on the farm and take it home with us.

The whole experience really opened my eyes on how much work it takes to maintain a farm, or even a garden, and I really gained an appreciation for the work these people do. I look forward to continuing my service days at the farm, although I hope we will not be so drenched!

Editors note: Alemany Farm empowers San Francisco residents to grow their own food, and through that process encourages people to become more engaged with their communities. Find out more about Alemany farms at www.alemanyfarm.org.