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Cultivating Curiosity
Valley students get their hands dirty with school-based garden programs
By Stewart Oksenhorn
Illène Pevec entered adulthood by educating herself in the ways of local food-growing. Pevec, a Stanford University student at the time, spent her 21st birthday planting a communal garden.
Over the four decades since, she has come to believe that she might have waited too long to immerse herself in sustainable agriculture. As a PhD student at the University of Colorado’s Children, Youth & Environment research center, Pevec focuses on creating programs that allow school kids to plant and harvest crops and enjoy the satisfaction—and health and environmental benefits—of producing their own food. The idea is that by planting those seeds early, by early adulthood those lessons and habits will be ingrained.
“People don’t yet understand how important it is to the general well-being of kids to have this opportunity,” says the 62-year-old Paonia resident. “Kids these days hear constantly about environmental degradation. When they garden, they realize they’re doing something positive, helping the soil, letting something grow. They feel positive about their own actions. And by having fresh food right there, they can pop it in their mouth—that is so fulfilling. They’re going to end up with the good food to eat, and inside they feel good.”
Getting kids involved with the production of food is hardly a new idea. The school year, after all, was designed around the agrarian idea that the more hands available for summertime farm chores, the better. But as food has become industrialized, American children— along with their parents—have become disconnected from the sources of their food.
In the Roaring Fork Valley, that connection is being re-established with a sense of urgency, thanks to groups like Slow Food Roaring Fork, which spurred the creation of the Aspen Elementary School garden, and true believers like Pevec, Jerome Osentowski of Basalt’s Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute and Osentowski’s colleague Michael Thompson.
In 2009, using California restaurateur Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard program as a model, Osentowski and Thompson’s Eco Systems Design established a 22-foot grow dome at the Yampah Mountain School, in Glenwood Springs. Soon after, the two, along with Pevec, took a small garden in back of Carbondale’s Roaring Fork High School and turned it into a greenhouse, 42 feet in diameter.
The plan is to keep growing. The hope for the Roaring Fork High School project is to add next year an irrigated 1½-acre plot, and launch a Community-Supported Agriculture project. Eco Systems Design recently installed a community greenhouse at an emerging TCI Lane Ranch residential neighborhood next to the Waldorf School on the Roaring Fork, near Carbondale, where the Waldorf students are in charge of planting and harvesting duties in a portion of the greenhouse, then using the food for school lunches and events. Osentowski and Thompson are in talks to bring food-production programs to schools in Aspen and Basalt. In Basalt, they have their eye on a piece of land next to Basalt High School, and Basalt Elementary School has approached them about turning a courtyard into a growing space. Osentowski says such initiatives meet little resistance; it’s hard to turn down opportunities that simultaneously boost children, the environment, health and education.
“Nobody seems to be saying, ‘No, no, no,’” he says, noting that school districts, planning departments and elected bodies have all greeted his proposals with enthusiasm. “But the devil is in the details.”
One of those key details is finding a teacher at each school who is willing to host the program and maintain the curriculum, like Hadley Hentschel, a science teacher at Roaring Fork High School, whose agricultural biology class leads the way in operating the school’s greenhouse. Hentschel has had several dozen kids each year sign up for the class, with four students this year in an in-depth independent study program.
The education in food, nutrition and the environment can be eye-opening for the kids.
“Most of them are hearing things they’ve never heard before about the difference between local markets and the commercial agriculture system,” says Hentschel. “It was something that had never crossed their radar: Where does your food come from, and what are the health effects of that?”
Beside the educational component, producing the food can build self-esteem. At Roaring Fork High School, the majority of the food grown goes straight to the cafeteria or to school functions. Often, other classes are given tours of the growing operation.
“It’s bragging rights for them,” Hentschel says. “They get a chance to say, ‘Here’s what we did,’ and give their friends a carrot.”
The programs in the Roaring Fork Valley might become a seed for others. Thompson says that Eco Systems Design has been con tacted by school districts on the Front Range and in New Mexico, seeking advice on how to create a food-growing curriculum.
While these food leaders focus on the details of turning passive plots of school land into active centers of education and nutrition, there is a parallel effort to transform the overall thinking about foods and gardens as a proper, even necessary subject of study. Pevec points out that, since creating gardens isn’t part of the schools’ core policy, much of her time is devoted to fund-raising.
“No one questions putting in a football field. No one questions we should have those at schools,” she says. “And to me, it’s a given that kids should have the chance to garden, to nourish the earth.” For more on the Waldorf School’s greenhouse garden project, visit our website at www.edibleaspen.com.
GO FIND IT!
Eco Systems Design
Jerome Osentowski 970.927.4158
Michael Thompson 970.274.0634
www.ecosystems-design.com
Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute
www.crmpi.org
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More Great Education Programs
Cabbage Patch Kids
The Bonnie Plants Third Grade Cabbage Program distributes free O.S. Cross or “oversized” cabbage plants to third-grade classrooms whose teachers sign up online to participate. This year approximately 1.5 million third-graders will be planting and taking care of their own mega-cabbage plants across the country. In Colorado there are already 600 classrooms and 12,500 children participating. Besides teaching children about gardening and the source of their food, the program awards a $1,000 scholarship to one student in each state. Colorado teachers must register their students by April 15, 2011. To learn more and to register, visit the Third Grade Cabbage Program page at www.bonnieplants.com.
Paradise Project
In Crested Butte, the Paradise Food Project has gained approval for its Living Classroom program, which will turn a 4,000-square-foot patch of grass at the Crested Butte Community School into a school garden. The produce will be sold at a farmers’ market in summer, and will go into cafeteria lunches in the fall. For more information visit www.paradisefoodproject.org.
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Colorado Rocky Mountain School Garden Leads the Way
Serving up academic excellence and gourmet food from the land to the kitchen
Throughout Colorado Rocky Mountain School’s (CRMS) five-plus decades, working the land has always played an important role. But it wasn’t until the late 1990s that the garden itself became a funded portion of the CRMS program.
Today, under the dedication of Linda Halloran, a full-time director, the CRMS garden has six elements: organic gardens, nursery, composting program, campus landscaping, public demonstration area of water-wise plants and a summer internship. While each of the elements plays an important role, it is the organic gardens and composting program that result in a unique relationship with the school’s kitchen.
One hundred percent of the harvest from this 1.5 acre organic garden goes to the CRMS kitchen program. Beginning mid April, students and staff start bringing in the fruit and vegetables and continue through late October. While the students are gone for the two summer months, only 10 percent of the harvested foods are served to visiting groups and staff. The rest is frozen or pickled for later consumption. In the fall when the students return, CRMS offers a first-quarter “garden harvest” and a Sustainability Dinner with 250 students, family members and staff attending and 90 percent of the food coming from the garden. Throughout the year, 20 percent of the produce (approximately 6,000 pounds) utilized by the school will have originated from the CRMS garden. With the currently proposed expansion of the garden program, this contribution will exceed 12,000 pounds annually over the next three years.
The CRMS kitchen is helmed by Chef Fiona O’Donnell Pax. After three years at Carbondale’s Russets restaurant, Chef O’Donnell Pax joined CRMS a year ago, intrigued by the school’s philosophy and commitment to sustainability and the concept of preparing meals for the students that came straight from the garden.
In addition to the entire CRMS student body, faculty and staff enjoying these nutritious, gourmet meals, there are kitchen work crews where students learn how to prep the evening meal, bake from scratch and learn cooking skills, giving the participating students an idea of what it takes to be a chef.
CRMS’s institutional garden and food programs inspire students to take the ethics and practices learned at CRMS and apply those principles as they enter the world making it a better place for everyone.
http://www.crms.org/
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An Edible Classroom at the Waldorf School on the Roaring Fork
By Kathryn Camp
On a sunny day in January, the Waldorf School third grade class jumped the playground fence and scampered across neighboring cow pastures. They crunched through melting snow under the watchful eyes of their practical arts teacher, Julianna Lichatz, who, along with several parents, had planned a gardening lesson in a nearby greenhouse.
This adventure was part of a curriculum in which the children experience the whole process from seed to plate – planting and nurturing, harvesting, cooking and serving the foods that they grow. The school’s biodynamic garden and orchard serve as classrooms, along with local farms, gardens and apiaries.
The TCI Lane Ranch Greenhouse is the latest extension of the school’s gardening program. The neighboring property owners generously invited WSRF students to garden in their state-of-the-art facility. Terrie Swerdove, TCI greenhouse director, greeted the children by welcoming them to pick parsley and red leaf lettuces growing in multi-layered raised beds. Next, she showed the children how to plant minuscule lettuce seeds. Back outside, parent volunteers, Ginger Janssen and Kay Graybill helped the students to work the dirt and fill seed trays. Finally, each child was given an assortment of arugula, spinach and romaine seeds to plant. Over the next six weeks, the class would return to tend their seedlings, and eventually harvest them to be served at the school’s annual gala fundraising event on March 19. The Full Moon Feast celebrates the abundance of local, organic food, while bringing the community at large, quite literally, to the table.
“Third grade is a time for children to learn more deeply how to use their hands, to clothe, feed and shelter themselves. Hands were humanity’s first tools. Children learn this in the garden, and in the kitchen,” says Lichatz.
Recipes created by the children could fill a cookbook. Many are inspired by meals that Lichatz experienced as a cook at a biodynamic farm school in Sweden. Other ideas come from the dishes of her childhood in New England. Lavender shortbread cookies, pickled pears, roasted McClure red potatoes with rosemary and hand-pressed apple cider are among recipes in which key ingredients are grown on the 13-acre riverfront campus.
The founder of the Waldorf School movement, Rudolf Steiner, was also the father of biodynamic farming – an approach to organic growing designed to give more back to the soil than is taken from it. Each grade will find itself in the garden throughout the year. For example, the kindergarteners enter their building by first walking under a honeysuckle-covered archway, and through the circular garden, where they might stop to pick a strawberry or chive blossom along their way. The fifth graders study botany, which will take them to the garden to choose one plant to draw in exacting detail, to chronicle its yearly cycles. The ways that this learning inspires the children become apparent in their schoolwork. However, their parents first see results in empty plates of devoured spinach. Want your kids to eat their greens? Give them a garden! www.waldorfcarbondale.org
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