Melting Bees Wax

The Third Grade took apart our empty bee hive and melted down the empty comb to make beeswax products.

 The children chose the cleanest part of the comb for melting. 




After the wax melted, the children strained it in cheesecloth.

There was lots of dark matter left behind. The official name for this is "slumgum". It includes the pupal lining of the comb and excrement from the larvae. This means we were melting brood comb, as opposed to honey comb which is cleaner. Apparently slumgum warmed by the sun is used to attract swarms of bees when a hive needs to be filled. Bees are very attracted to it. Slumgum can also be a great fertilizer.

These photos show our clean wax hardening, and below, our final lip balm gifts.

Garden Items for the Winter Fair

This year the children and I prepared things to sell at the Winter Fair to benefit our school. 

We put together a collection of seedlings appropriate for winter planting. The flat contains lettuce and broccoli. 

We also put together our well liked herbal tea. You can see our garden ingredients listed. When we don't have enough of a plant, I do augment with organic teas from the Rainbow Grocery bulk tea bins. Usually it's just the nettles and peppermint we're low on.

Next to the collection of tea bags, you'll see a glass jar of sea salt herb rub. We grew those ingredients and the Third Grade loved mixing it all up. The courtyard around the Third Grade garden smelled amazing! 

The funny thing was, at the Winter Fair we did not specify that this salt rub was for cooking. After the Fair, I heard of at least one person who bought it for their bath. The rub won't hurt them, but the garlic wafting from the tub's waters might be an unwelcome surprise.

In Season

Here are some photos of our most recent harvest. You see two typical cool weather crops - radish and snap peas. Surprisingly, hiding in the pile are also some green beans. Our beans hung on (no pun intended!) a long time this year. We are just taking our last Scarlet Runners off the vine.

Below, take a look at this split radish. It's a lovely photo, but not an ideal radish outcome. Research indicates that radishes split for two reasons. One, they are past their prime. Two, they received a bounty of moisture after a relatively dry period. They root takes the water up so quickly, it literally pops!

Making the Fall Compost Pile

We make a big windrow of compost twice a year. We are just finishing up our pile for fall. We make it with vegetable cuttings, seedless weeds, straw, and horse manure. I get the horse manure from Horse Hill in Mill Valley.

One of the principles of Biodynamic farming is to generate fertility within the farm system itself. So, an ideal farm will have just the right number of animals to produce enough manure to fertilize the farm. In turn, the farm will produce enough animal feed for those animals.

At St. Anne's we don't have our own farm animals so I must bring in manure. Ideally this would be manure from a cow or horse living on a very local Biodynamic farm. This is not an option for us here in SF, so I try the second best thing, which is to bring in manure from animals living the closest possible life intended for their species.

Horse Hill in Mill Valley is a lovely spot where the horses live in a herd and are free to roam and run among the grassy hillsides. They are fed hay in the dry months, but the rest of the year eat a lot of fresh grass. The folks looking after the horses have built a manure bin, which makes it easy to shovel the poop into bags and drive it back to SF. I scurry across the Golden Gate with my windows down to spare my family the smell later in the day.

These action photos show Kindergarten 3 children hauling compost supplies and enthusiastically tamping down the pile.

First Grade Fairy Houses

 It's be come a tradition for the First Graders to welcome the garden fairies with their own inviting homes.

  The pumpkins are nestled all over the garden.

 The children decorate them in groups, according to their own design sensibilities. 

They collect branches, flowers, pebbles, and straw to make furniture, doors and landscaping.

One home even had a pet slug!

A Pumpkin Mystery

This Halloween the Second Grade children visited a lovely pumpkin patch at Spring Hill Dairy in Petaluma http://www.springhillcheese.com/ This is a fantastic pumpkin patch: the scenery is gorgeous, the children get to milk a cow, visit with young farm animals, ride a tractor, dig potatoes (they were huge!), and choose a pumpkin in the field. In addition, there is a large straw bale pyramid to climb, a straw bale maze, and free tastes of cheese curd and delicious ice cream.

While we were wandering the fields I came upon a pumpkin sight I have never seen before:



I found several pumpkins that were pumpkin skin on the outside, yet the insides were pure soil.

I asked the farmer accompanying us if he knew why such a thing would occur, but he was similarly mystified. I have looked for explanations on the internet but so far have come up empty.

The pumpkins were clearly rotten, in some cases the skin was dehydrated (below), but in other cases it was still moist and rather thick (see above).

It appeared to me that the inside of the pumpkin had somehow sucked the soil into its skin, but how or why I have no idea!

Any ideas out there?

Look at our Scarlet Runner Beans!

These grow two stories high-really! We plant them so they grow up the balconies at the grade school. One year we found a tiny Jack doll climbing a vine.

Sharing the Harvest

Each Tuesday when the Third Grade comes to St. Anne's, one of the jobs is to prepare something fresh from our garden to share with the residents during their lunch in the dining hall.

We started this tradition during the 2011-12 school year, and the serving activity has been very popular! The children love it. Their time in the dining hall acting as waiters and waitresses calls forth their best manners and conversation skills. The children go table to table carrying plates of our produce and offering it to the residents. The children must describe the offering, serve it, and make polite conversation while they are there.

The residents enjoy this immensely. They like the fresh backyard food, and love to see the children and ask them questions.

Our recent offerings have included fresh salad with herbed vinaigrette, celery with herbed cream cheese, fresh apples, and lots of sweet-pea bouquets for the tables.

These photos show two Third Graders harvesting apples to share from our school tree. We are also lucky to have a kind neighbor of St. Anne's who lets me pick all the apples from his two apple trees to give to the Home. The kitchen makes all sorts of fresh apple delicacies for the residents, and, the Third Grade serves some freshly cut slices at lunch.

A collection of sunflowers

Sunflowers are a big hit in the garden. Each year we grow some from seeds we purchase, but others from seeds we've collected in prior years. Sunflowers can pick up traits from other varieties if they are anywhere within .5 to 3 miles away. Since we always plant different varieties in the same garden, our harvested seeds we simply call "St. Anne's Sunflowers".

Here are some photos of our flowers now in Fall 2012. Did you know that a sunflower is actually comprised of 100's-1000's individual flowers on its face? Each seed is attached to its own flower.  While we might think of a sunflower as one giant flower, it's not that at all!

Our two apple trees at the Waldorf Grade School

I gave our apple treesa significant thinning last winter and it seems to have increased fruit production this fall. Here's a photo of our larger tree, loaded with fruit.

These trees pre-date my tenure by a long time, as a result, I don't know the apple variety. Any ideas?



In a month or so, the 3rd graders will harvest the fruit with our handy fruit picker and use the apples for Harvest Dinner cobblers. Yum!

Those pesky Agapanthus roots

When we first cleared space for our garden at St. Annes over seven years ago, our hardest job was ridding the soil of the myriad Agaphantus plants and their rhizomes and roots. To this day, our garden retains several Agapanthus. They are now relatively contained in certain areas for landscaping effect, but we continue to have trouble with their greedy roots under the ground.

Above you'll see a photo of what should be a blueberry root ball. The bush was planted 2 feet away from a stand of our Agapanthus. A couple years later the blueberry began to show failure to thrive, so we dug it up and lo and behold, we could immediately see why. Those bright white worm-like roots you see throughout are Agapanthus roots. They wind their way into the neighboring plants root balls and begin to take over their food source. I have even found a plant root that had a hole born through it by an Agapanthus root.

Before we planted the blueberry in a new location, we took several minutes to comb out all the agapanthus roots. I have read that one only need fear the larger brown  rhizome of the Agapanthus in terms of reproducing, but I didn't want to take any chances.

Agapanthus are known as African Lillies. We know them as poisonous (all parts of the plant can induce vomiting if ingested, or rashes if the sap is rubbed on skin). However, I found this interesting description of how the plant parts can be used on a Southern Africa plant website: www.plantzafrica.com

Uses & cultural aspects 
Agapanthus is considered to be both a magical and a medicinal plant, and the plant of fertility and pregnancy. Xhosa women use the roots to make antenatal medicine, and they make a necklace using the roots that they wear as a charm to bring healthy, strong babies. The Zulu use agapanthus to treat heart disease, paralysis, coughs, colds, chest pains and tightness. It is also used with other plants in various medicines taken during pregnancy to ensure healthy children, or to augment or induce labour. It is also used as a love charm and by people afraid of thunderstorms, and to ward off thunder. Margaret Roberts (1990) advises hikers to put leaves in their shoes to soothe the feet, and to wrap weary feet in the leaves for half an hour. The long, strap-like leaves also make an excellent bandage to hold a dressing or poultice in place, and winding leaves around the wrists are said to help bring a fever down. Agapanthus contains several saponins and sapogenins that generally have anti-inflammatory (reduce swelling and inflammation), anti-oedema (oedema = swelling due to accumulation of fluid), antitussive (relieve or suppress coughing) and immunoregulatory (have influence on the immune system) properties. Although the precise activity of agapanthus compounds is not known, preliminary tests have shown uterotonic activity (increases the tone of uterine muscles). Agapanthus is suspected of causing haemolytic poisoning in humans, and the sap causes severe ulceration of the mouth.

Over the years the children have made attractive braided necklaces and bracelets from the roots. 

Strawberry Mystery

In early August I took these photos of one of our strawberry plants at St. Anne's. You can see that the seeds on the outside of the two berries appear to be sprouting! I have never seen this before and have tried to research it on the web but have come up empty handed. The berries are clearly immature, and the conditions were not necessarily favorable to sprouting the seeds either. Not to mention the fact that strawberry plants reproduce themselves with runners, not typically by seed.



In trying to find an explanation for this event, I did come upon some interesting strawberry facts. Strawberries are not true berries in the botanical sense. They are technically known as an "aggregate accessory fruit". Courtesy of Wikipedia, this means that the red, fleshy, ripened part we call the strawberry fruit is not actually the ovary as in true fruit, but only the part that holds the ovaries. This means that those seeds one sees on the outside of the strawberry are the true fruits (ovaries) and they hold a very small seed inside each of them.

Strawberries are close relatives of the rose.

If anyone knows why our strawberry seeds sprouted, please let me know!

End July, 2012



Back in the spring the Second Graders planted sweet peas in a long planter box on the patio in the backyard of St. Anne's. As I've mentioned in earlier posts, we are always looking for ways to better bring the garden to the residents and the residents into the garden.

The children and I decided that a column of sweet peas would be a lovely addition to the patio. The brick patio is a place for residents to congregate outdoors as well as bring their visitors to admire the garden.

The sweet peas took off and loved the San Francisco cool summer climate. By July the bushes were taller than I was and full of flowers. They have been in constant production even to now, mid November. We will finally remove them this week, in fact, after five months of blooms.

The sweet smell of the flowers has been an attraction for the residents. Plants that have multiple sensory stimuli work the best in horticultural therapy. Sweet peas fit this bill perfectly: their colors are vibrant and their smell is powerful and pleasant.



In late July two volunteers, a resident, and I harvested hundreds of sweet peas so that we could make a full vase for every resident's room. We spent an hour cutting the flowers and putting them in vases, then walked up and down the hallways visiting each resident and placing a vase of flowers in his or her room.

This fall the sweet peas continue to bring smiles. For the past several weeks, the now Third Grade children cut sweet peas and bring them into the St. Anne's dining room in addition to our plates of garden food. The children walk around with the vases and invite the residents to take a deep smell of the lovely flowers. We all look forward to a new crop in 2013.

July 2012

The Radish Test

In spring the 3rd grade made the garden program several handsome, recycled-wood boxes as part of the children's woodwork rotation. These are seed flat boxes and we use them to start seeds in large quantities. The boxes range in depth from 3-4 inches.



The children and I did a test toward the end of school where we planted radishes in the boxes to see if we could harvest a successful root crop in the relatively shallow containers. We tried three kinds of radishes: Scarlet Globe, Munchen Bier, and Chinese Red Meat.

Over the summer, my son Raymond and his friend Hank helped me harvest and tally the results. You can see their table here. There are the names of the radishes, and also two columns. The "G" column on the left stands for good, the "B" column stands for bad. This refers to the radish quality when the boys dug it up.

Scarlet Globe was the clear winner. 

We inspected the box where the two losing radishes were planted and discovered the soil area filled with horizontal root packs. The roots hadn't been able to go deep enough in the box, and the result was a poorly grown, small and woody radish. The Scarlet Globes grew just as their package described and didn't create any of this extra, horizontal root mass.

It's better to grow radishes in-ground, but at least we know we can get Scarlet Globe radishes from the flat boxes when needed.

June 2012
Our End of Year Thank You at St. Anne's

Today the third grade children enjoyed what will become an annual event from this year forward. Along with Ms. Fendell and several parents, the third graders came to St. Anne's to say thank you and good bye.

When they arrived, the children gathered on the back patio to recall some of their favorite accomplishments over their four years of garden work. Then we reviewed our best manner skills for passing food and interacting with the residents in the dining room.



The third grade went in groups to the two dining rooms to serenade the diners with seasonal songs. After that, the children passed platters of garden inspired food. Once the residents had tasted our bounty to their hearts' content, the children returned to the patio where they feasted as well.

Our menu featured as many garden ingredients as possible:

Fava dip with carrots, snap peas, and crackers (favas, olive oil, rosemary, lemon, water, salt, pepper)

Mint brownies

Herbed couscous salad with arugula 

Fresh green salad with mixed garlic herb dressing 

Chard and leek quiche

The party was a wonderful way to let St. Anne's hear and taste our appreciation for allowing us to garden there these many years.

Late May, 2012

Live Power Community Farm, May 2012

Let me share some highlights from the 3rd grade trip to Live Power Community Farm in Covelo, CA.

Covelo is in Round Valley, just over an hour NE of Willits. The farm is a lovely, 40 acre Biodynamic farm run by the Decater family for over 25 years. The farm is worked only with human, horse and sun power. You can learn more about Live Power here.




The Decaters run a CSA for San Francisco and Mendocino County. I have been a member for 9 seasons and can attest to the delicious, vital food they produce.




Each year, the 3rd grade from SFWS spends three nights and four days working on the farm. The children weed, scythe, harvest, and plant. They also do daily animal chores, learn to plow behind a draft horse, shear a sheep,

This is how you hold down a sheep while it gets its wool  cut.

and generally come to understand the hard work that farms demand.

 I've included several photos to provide a look at our most recent stay with Ms. Fendell's Third Grade Class in late May of 2012.

Finished compost pile

Manure waiting to go into a new compost pile

This year a local blacksmith came and we made our own nails!

Do you know the story about the turnip?

These are leeks, but the story has the same ending!

Stephen teaching the children about horse drawn plows

Tools we used