Transplanted Lettuce, February 3rd, 2012

Ahhh, now the lettuce can stretch its arms!

After we discussed the accidentally crowded conditions, some of the K2 children worked to transplant the crowded lettuces. Transplanting is another job that challenges the fine motor skills of the children. Often, over-eager fingers push and pull the small plants, causing the stems to break. Planting extra seeds compensates for these losses. Also, I find it works better for the adult helpers to prick out the seedlings from their original home, and lay them out on a damp paper towel in the shade where the children can pick them up one at a time.

Before they choose their seedling, however, the children take a slender stick and poke a hole in the soil deep enough for the root to slide right down. Then, with their slender stick, the children gently poke the soil around the plant to firmly support the seeding.

You can see that our lettuce seeds now have plenty of room to grow. If we only wanted to harvest young leaves for a lettuce mix, we could allow the plants to grow in these conditions, but, if we're looking to grow a full lettuce head, they'll need to be transplanted once again and given even more room to themselves.

I have wanted wooden seed start boxes for many years to enable us to move away from the brittle and disposable plastic cell packs. This year, the 3rd grade children are making me lots of boxes from an old fence one of the woodworking parents lives near. The boxes are roomy and just right to grow lots of seeds in a roomy manner.

Also, you can see our cold frame that we built two summers ago. It is made of untreated redwood and a sheet of plastic to create a hinged top. It gets quite warm in there so I always leave it open for ventilation (usually about 4 inches). However, this invites the slugs, too. Everyday I have to look in there to make sure I don't see any telltale slime trails.

Too Crowded! February 2nd, 2012

Take a look at the overcrowded cells here.

Planting precise quantities of small seeds is a good exercise in small motor skills and counting for the children. As you can see, it's a challenge! I find the most successful cell pack planting comes with larger seeds like peas or beans, ones the children can carefully keep track of as they lay them in the soil.

However, our garden grows all kinds of plants, so I challenge the children to try planting "just a few" when it comes to tiny seeds like lettuce.

When the seeds are too crowded I liken it to sharing a chair with a dozen other children. There would just be too many children to get any drawing, eating, or chopping done. Bodies would be this way and that, all struggling to find support from that one chair.

This is similar to how the lettuce plants must scratch it out if they are planted too closely. Their roots get tangled, there is competition for food and water, and plants that can't stretch and grow end up stunted.

I showed K2 this cell pack when they came back to the garden today. The children remembered planting the lettuce seeds in January and were surprised to see just how many seeds fell into one hole and none into another! Looking at a lopsided cell pack like this is a great way for the kids to remember how to spread the seeds out better the next time. When we plant small seeds again, I can refer to the crowded cell where the lettuce plants were fighting to share just one seat at the table.

Article on Shared Grant Making in the Chronicle of Philanthropy

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

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

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

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

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