Starting Beans

Suddenly it's raining every day. Too wet to plant things outdoors. But a perfect time to get things started in seed trays in the classroom.

I read three times a week to one of the classes at my daughter's charter school and in spring our attention turns to the garden. Sprouting seeds is always a fascinating activity for the kids. So I brought a bag of last year's bean pods and had the kids open them to see what's inside.


Even Kindergartners catch on fast. I didn't have to show them how to pry the seed pods open. As you can see, we have two different kinds of pole beans. If all goes well, they'll soon be climbing the chain link fence that surrounds the school's sprawling container garden.

I simply filled the seed cells with soil from the garden. It's mostly compost, very loose. Everyone planted two seeds along with a craft stick with her name on it. We also planted a few leftover cells for good measure and created a special germination exhibit, hiding some seeds in damp paper towel. We'll check on them occasionally so we can watch the plant emerge.

Kids love to mess with seeds.

White House to Veg Garden with School Kids

The garden and food blogs are all atwitter with news that Michelle Obama will be installing a food garden at the White House.

Apparently I was outnumbered in my argument against the garden on grounds that President Obama should think about food policy for the whole nation before he started feeding the First Family produce from the back yard. I also thought there was something politically awkward about the Obamas having a staff to feed them garden-fresh produce in a time of financial crisis, or in the absence of a federal program to help everyone install a garden. Too much symbolism, not enough substance for my taste. (A cohort in the food intelligensia agreed with me, but not very publicly.)

What I suggested was that instead of directing the gardening efforts at themselves, the Obamas should think of adopting a school garden. Kids--especially in an urban environment--need the experience of growing their own food so much more, and it would be a huge boost to the idea of school gardens as well connecting schools to local food. As I said then, there were any number of schools within walking distance of the White House that the Obamas could team up with. To my mind, that was the perfect way for the Obamas to have their garden and eat it too.

Could it be that the White House was listening? The New York Times quotes Michelle Obama as saying that the garden's "most important role will be will be to educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables at a time when obesity has become a national concern." To that end, the White House is enlisting a squadron of fifth-grader from Bancroft Elementary School--located just blocks from our house in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood of the District of Columbia--to come to the White House and dig up an 1,100-square-foot area of lawn and install a vegetable garden there. Thenceforth, the kids will be involved in planting seeds as well as harvesting and cooking the garden's bounty, all under the supervision of the Obama's personal chef Sam Kass.

The Obamas, meanwhile, will help pull weeds "whether they like it or not," Michelle Obama said.

This has to be considered the ultimate reward for Mt. Pleasant resident Iris Rothman, who for years has been the moving force behind the gardening efforts at Bancroft Elementary. Thanks to Rothman, a large swath of asphalt at the school was removed some years ago and replaced with a huge rain garden. The school also boasts numerous raised beds for vegetables and more than two dozen trees planted, thanks to Rothman's tireless efforts.

Will Iris be involved in the White House project? Will she get a big hug from Michelle Obama in recognition of all her local gardening efforts? We certainly hope so. Congratulations, Iris.

Before we get carried away, however, I would just warn the Obamas that while we appreciate this clever solution to the White House garden question, we are still looking for the food policy piece. Or what if the First Lady were to take on the school lunch issue?

Now there's something she could really sink her teeth into....

Schools & Community Gardens

Walking my daughter to school each morning, I often looked wistfully at the huge expanse of yard next to Cardozo Senior High School and thought what a wonderfully productive garden it would make. All that space with a clear southern and western exposure. What a shame to pave it over with grass that no one ever used (except to fly a kite sometimes).

Well, the flattest part of the yard, actually a complex of asphalt basketball courts, recently was turn into a parking lot. Too bad. But there's still plenty of yard that could be gardened. Come to think of it, after the federal government, the District of Columbia school system is one of the largest property owners in the city. There are dozens of large campuses and hundreds of smaller school yards all over town. Why do we plant them with grass? Why not turn them into food gardens? Even better, why not turn them into community gardens that everyone could use to grow local food?

For the last couple of years I worked with an organization that was all about promoting school gardens and trying to integrate gardening into school curricula. It was a tough slog. But I think it might be more successful if, instead of trying to organize gardens strictly within the school, the efforts were expanded to bring in the entire community. Turn school gardens into community gardens.

Of course, someone's already done it. And here's an excellent article about a group in Petaluma, California, that is bringing community and schools together to establish gardens and a CSA to help feed the hungry. They also work with a group that focuses solely on gleaning, or collecting unharvested fruits from people's back yards.

Humans can be so resourceful when they put their minds to it.

White House Food Garden: Time to Go Back to School

It seems the whole world is badgering the Obamas to tear up part of the White House lawn and plant a food garden.

Kitchen Gardeners International started a petition called "Eat the View" that calls on the first family to plant a "victory garden" within their first 100 days in office. Michael Pollan, writing in the New York Times Magazine last year, proposed turning five acres of White House property into a farm, and a website in California got nearly 60,000 readers to vote on who should be the farmer. Now our friend Susan Harris, blogging at Garden Rant, has rolled out a whole cast of characters to design, advise on and maintain a White House kitchen garden.

Apparently the intent of all this activity aimed at the Obamas and their food habits is to inspire the rest of the country to eat better, support healthy agriculture and perhaps even plant a garden of their own. Being an avid kitchen gardener and local food advocate myself, I have a hard time arguing against people growing their own food. However, I do have a couple of issues with the proposal as currently constructed, and would like to offer an alternative suggestion.

First, unless President Obama is willing to declare war on the unholy corporate-government alliance that is responsible for this country's miserable diet, he looks a bit disingenuous feeding his family garden-fresh produce on the public dime. Before he can lay claim to the mantle of Gardener in Chief, the new president needs to demonstrate that he is willing to implement government policies that undo the choke hold that giant agribusiness has on this county's food production. So far we are getting some inklings of reform. But Obama's choice of Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, drew a resounding Bronx cheer from the nation's food advocacy establishment. The new president still needs to establish his creds as champion of an alternate food system. (Obama's support of ethanol is hardly encouraging, but also not surprising, since he hails from Illinois, a major corn growing state. In fact, food and agriculture are not even listed on the Obama White House agenda.)

Second, do the Obamas really want to be in a position of saying, "Hey! Look at us! We're eating a whole lot better than you are!" It's one thing to lead by example. It's quite another to put yourself at odds with the way most of the country feeds itself. The last time the government encouraged people to plant gardens was during World War II when food was being rationed. It made sense for everyone to consider growing their own produce. But the government has no such policy in place. In fact, government policy has been to support agribusiness as we know it, which means tax dollars subsidizing a glut of corn and soybean products, the essence of our poor diet. Last time I looked, the president still represented the whole country, not just produce gourmands and local food fanatics. How does it look for him to be thumbing his nose at the good ol' regular food most people buy in the supermarket?

Third, there is something unseemly about the First Family luxuriating in a garden-fresh diet at a time when the country is in an economic tailspin and many families are just trying to hang on to their homes. Paradoxically, this would be a perfect time for millions of Americans to consider ditching their Turf Builder and planting a food garden instead. Growing your own food for the cost of some seeds saves a fortune in grocery bills. But sadly we are no longer a gardening culture. Those skills were lost with the passing of prior generations. Asking people to start busting sod on their own when the Obamas have a paid staff to do it for them is asking a bit much. If we want to rekindle the gardening spirit, we should do it with an all-out national undertaking and not lay it on the First Family.

Fourth, a sprawling food garden behind the White House would mark the Obamas as glaringly apart from their neighbors in the District of Columbia, where few residents have five acres--or even a fraction of that amount--at their disposal. In D.C., a meal for too many inner-city children consists of a bottle of artificially-flavored high-fructose corn syrup and a bag of potato chips from the corner convenience store. The poverty rate for school children ages 5 - 17 in the District of Columbia is 51.3 percent compared with 34.5 percent nationally, the highest in the nation. This translates into 56,000 children at risk of hunger in Washington, D.C., or 1 in 2 children. More than 12 percent of the city's households struggle with hunger. Some 109,000 residents are eligible to participate in the Food Stamp Program each month, however only two-thirds actually receive food stamps, and of those who do, 74 percent report that their food stamps do not last the entire month.

For all these reasons, past First Families have not spent much time advertising their personal eating habits. Little did we know that White House chefs were busy sourcing local, healthy foods, long before food celebrities such Ruth Reichl and Alice Waters and Danny Meyers started spouting their opinions about how the kitchen at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue should operate. The Clintons grew some of their personal food on the White House roof. Laura Bush was adamant that her family dine on organic products.

The Obamas, too, might appreciate a little privacy around their choice of victuals. But I have a suggestion that would allow them to get behind local food in a very public way without inviting a billion prying eyes into the backyard or private dining room: sponsor a school garden.

I'm surprised Alice Waters has not suggested this before. She's been talking for years about building one of her Edible Schoolyards in the nation's capital. The Obamas adopting a school garden would fit perfectly with what Agriculture Sec. Tom Vilsack has said are some of his department's highest priorities: improving child nutrition and giving schools greater access to local food. School gardens make perfect sense. If we are going to be a nation of healthy, sustainable eaters, we should teach it to our kids. This would be a great way for the Obamas to connect with the local community, and Lord knows our local schools could use the support. It would be an invaluable opportunity for teachers, school administrators and parents to close ranks around an issue of paramount importance, as well as a rare chance for Barack and Michelle Obama to learn on a personal level the kinds of challenges that public schools--and especially inner-city schools--face in their efforts to embrace healthy food.

The Obamas would learn, for instance, just how hard it is to turn local produce into meals where there are no cooking facilities. (School cafeterias are just glorified food lines any more. Perhaps after helping with the harvest, the president and first lady could take fruits and vegetables back to the White House and have their chefs do the cooking). Some schools don't even have soil: Everything has to be planted in containers. Still, even city kids love to work in the garden and eat the fruits of their labors. They need every opportunity they can get.

Talk about your shovel-ready projects. We've got plenty of schools. Just throw a dart at the map. We've also got numerous organizations that know just what needs to be done to make a model school food garden happen. There's D.C. Schoolyard Greening, a coalition of government and private groups the supports school gardens and helps incorporate gardening activities into the curriculum. There's City Blossoms, a group that specializes in building teaching gardens for children. There's the Washington Youth Garden, whose program centers on gardening with inner-city families and reaching out to city schools with nutrition and cooking lessons. There's the 7th Street Garden, an urban agriculture enterprise versed in all phases of fruit and vegetable production and committed to food security for the needy. There's Casey Trees, a non-profit intent on planting more fruit trees in the city in places where they will be well cared for. And now the Obamas have brought their personal chef from Chicago, Sam Kass, who is all about healthy local food and families.

Putting a school garden project like this together with White House backing would hardly take any time at all, maybe a few phone calls. Most schools would jump at the chance. So I say this to the Obamas: you can have your garden and eat it too. Do it for the kids. Do it for the schools. Every school board in the country will sit up and take notice.

Finally, A Place To Sit

The garden at my daughter's charter school here in the District of Columbia is into its third season. A year ago a nearby condominium association donated five of these big, sturdy metal benches. I had the perfect spot for them: surrounding our herb garden, where my gardening partner, Elizabeth, built this brilliant, ceramic-lined pond. I envisioned this as a most excellent way for teachers and students to enjoy the garden, sitting quietly on the benches and soaking in the pleasures of our green urban oasis.

There was just one problem with the benches. The legs--heavy steel tubes--were designed to be sunk into the ground. Well, our ground is asphalt. So the legs needed to be custom-cut to size. One of the teachers, a sculptor, brought his grinding tool and fixed one of the benches. But then he was pulled away to do other things and the benches sat in pieces in a dark stairwell for months.

One year later, I couldn't wait any longer. This week I hiked down to the local tool rental shop and got my own grinder. A couple of hours later, the benches were finally in place. The fifth bench found a spot on the playground where teachers can sit while the kids are playing on the monkey bars.

Finally, we have a place to relax and enjoy our garden.

And just in time, too. The chives are blooming. And the perennial pond plants are responding to the change in seasons with new growth.

We have several clematis plants climbing the chain link fence that surrounds our garden. Some of them are quite spectacular.

The happiest plants of all in our garden are the lamb's ears. I'm not sure why, but they go wild. Our soil mix is at least half compost. They must like it. They are so rampant I've had to start thinning them. They would happily take over our containers and crowd out everything else.

The pinks come back right on schedule, even after they've been so rudely moved around during the lamb's ear thinning.

All I can say about these is, they are awfully red and hard to miss.

The roses like their beds of compost as well. We have a profusion of flower buds this year and the blossoms are exquisite.

Gardening can be so worth the effort sometimes.

Teaching Teachers to Garden

Each year one of the groups I work with, D.C. Schoolyard Greening, holds a two-day workshop aimed at helping more teachers create gardens at their schools. This is the second year that we've held our hands-on session at the Washington Youth Garden in the National Arboretum. In the picture at left, Gilda Allen, of the D.C. Department of the Environment, Watershed Protection Division, leads a session in soil testing and composting.

This year we were lucky to have Judy Tiger, former executive director of Garden Resources of Washington, opening the session with some detailed advice on working with kids outdoors. Taking a group of 20 or more children into the garden is no easy trick. You can't just open the door and turn them loose. Judy has years of experience and lots of good tips for keeping kids focused--or at least not starting a riot.

Rule number one: Never let kids play with the garden hose. (Or maybe just once on a special occasion.) And a suggestion: Don't tell kids they are spreading compost. Tell them they are sprinkling "fairy dust."

Is it just my imagination, or are our teachers getting younger, smarter and more enthusiastic about this school gardening concept? We had about two dozen enroll this year. That's a great turnout, especially considering that in years past, the teachers were paid to be there.

We divided the group in two and they switched between two workshops in the morning--Gilda's on soil and composting and another on seed starting and transplanting. Claire Cambardella of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation brought in a homemade lunch of fresh, local ingredients (and even home-baked rolls). Then we were back in the field for two more workshops, garden maintenance and creating garden lesson plans.

Somehow I got tagged to handle the maintenance end. For an organic gardener that usually means talking about weeds. But I prefer to talk about how modern gardening is turning back the clock, rejecting pesticides and artificial fertilizers and reviving a more intimate relationship with nature and natural rhythms. In our scheme, maintenance is more about building great soil. Still, we give the teachers a very cool Japanese gardening tool that looks like a cross between a chef's knife and a martial arts weapon. It's just the thing for digging out weeds at the roots.

My partner this year in the maintenance division was Marti Goldstone who has spent the last nine years building an incredible garden at the Horace Mann Elementary School in Northwest D.C. Her group started with jack hammers and backhoes, digging up asphalt and concrete to make room for garden beds.

School gardens face special challenges since they're on vacation for much of the prime growing season. Still, Marti and her science teaching partner Louise Hill have managed to keep the garden growing year after after and now have integrated food preparation into the scheme, not an easy trick either when your school has no cooking facilities. But Marti says they may have licked that problem as well--plans for a small kitchen are on the drawing board.


We were experiencing a short heat wave this weekend and that brought all kinds of visitors to the garden. Some are starting their gardening at a very early age. Maybe we are looking at the garden teachers of the future.

Teaching Teachers to Make Salad

Since building a large container garden at my daughter's charter school two years ago I've been involved in teaching kids how to prepare fresh produce as well as working with an organization that helps other teachers start gardens at their own schools.

School gardens expose children to healthy, locally grown food and can be used to teach all sorts of skills, including science, reading, math and art. But getting school gardens off the ground and maintaining them present a number of challenges. Not least of these is the fact that most schools are on vacation during the summer, the peak growing season in most areas of the country.

That's why I emphasize salad and other greens in the school gardening scheme. Cool weather crops such as leaf lettuce, arugula, mizuna, cress and mache can be planted in March or April and harvested before the school year is over. To those you can add radishes and carrots. The carrots might not be ready till fall. Or, in our case, you can plant carrots in the fall and be harvesting them in spring. Fall is a good time to plant a second round of salad.

Yesterday was our annual teacher workshop with D.C. Schoolyard Greening, the organization I work with. I presided over the salad clinic, where I gave my best pitch for growing salads and also passed along some of the lessons I've learned working with groups of children.

* Avoid taking large groups of children into the garden by yourself. Focus and control become issues when kids are released to the outdoors. I try to have at least one other adult with me, and work with two or three kids at a time planting seeds or harvesting. There need to be specific rules of behavior in the garden.

* Kids love harvesting and preparing vegetables. Planting seeds takes no more than a few minutes. But you can occupy children for hours turning lettuce into salad. They will fight for a chance to wash the lettuce and crank it dry in the salad spinner. I prefer to plant leaf lettuces rather than heading lettuces. Leaf lettuces grow fast, and they produce more leaves when you cut them.

* Teach kids basic kitchen safety. An important lesson is placing a kitchen towel under the cutting board to keep it from moving. An unstable cutting surface leads to injuries.

* Young children in my classes use plastic knives, which are good enough to cut things like carrots and radishes. But vegetables should lie flat for cutting. Chasing a radish around the cutting board is dangerous. Instead, cut it in half lengthwise to create a flat surface. It can then be sliced without moving. I usually slice carrots into sticks before giving them to children to cut into dice.

* Kids love working with simple tools. They will occupy themselves for hours with a vegetable peeler or a box grater. To peel a carrot, I teach them to work on one half of the carrot first, then flip the carrot around to peel the other half. This makes the work go faster and reduces the risk of fingertips getting cut.

* Making vinaigrette is a good way to teach fractions as well as the concept of an emulsion. A classic vinaigrette consists of three parts oil to one part vinegar. Here's a simple recipe for a honey-mustard vinaigrette:

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon honey
generous pinch coarse salt
pinch ground pepper
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

In a bowl, whisk together mustard, honey, salt, pepper and vinegar. Add a drop or two of olive oil and whisk vigorously until the olive oil is completely incorporated. Add remaining olive oil and whisk until vinaigrette is smooth and homogeneous. Taste and adjust seasonings as needed. If it seems too sharp, whisk in more olive oil.

Pass the bowl around so the kids can take turns using the whisk. They will not tire of it. Pretty soon you will have kids loving the salad they made themselves.

Getting Dick and Jane Into the Garden

Has this ever happened to you: You show up at an event only to discover that the location for the event you had planted in your mind is miles from where you are supposed to be?

Last night I arrived with a trunk full of food for a panel discussion on installing gardens in city schools. Except the school where I arrived was on the other side of town from where this confab was actually being held. The addresses of the two schools are almost identical, but in opposite quadrants. So I was a little late. But apparently people were hungry enough to devour the food once the discussion was over.


My wife had made beautiful lavender-dusted scones and whole-grain English digestives. There was a big platter groaning with seasonal grapes and fresh figs and nuts. I had made crudites with an herb sauce from the garden and a spinach-artichoke dip with toasted pita chips.


It was a neat little spread for about 25 people.


But of course the real reason we were there was to promote the idea of gardening in city schools. We had a panel of experts to talk about the benefits of gardening with children and some of the nuts-and-bolts aspects of actually funding and building gardens, all sponsored by the D.C. Schoolyard Greening organization.


Also on the panel was the director of science for District of Columbia schools, Michael Kaspar, who, it seemed to me, had some important, cautionary words for the group. "I was just in a meeting today and it was repeated again: The focus of D.C. schools right now is reading and math," he said


D.C. school children don't test well in some of the basics, such as reading and math. As Mr. Kaspar was saying, school administrators are obsessed with improving reading and math test scores, as mandated by the "No Child Left Behind" law. The point he was really trying to drive home to us garden promoters was, If you can't make gardens relevant to reading and math, your gardening projects are not going to resonate very strongly with school officials.


That's a bit of a wake-up call for us obsessive gardeners who are just working ourselves into a frazzle trying to drum up enthusiasm for the idea of connecting children with nature, with the benefits of being outside, with home-grown vegetables. And we hear so much from celebrity foodists such as Alice Waters on the subject of making the connection between children and nutritious, locally grown food. Could it really all come back to reading and math and test scores?


To my mind, kids in the District of Columbia deserve a chance to muck about in the soil, to witness the miracle of seeds turning into plants, to taste a salad right out of the garden. But apparently we're going to have to work even harder to show that gardens are good for reading and math.

Who knew getting schools to build gardens would be such a struggle? Nothing is as simple as one would like...

Success!

The mayor, the schools chancellor, the head of the city's department of the environment--even WRC-TV's political reporter, Tom Sherwood--anybody who's anybody it seems was at yesterday's kickoff to the first-ever D.C. School Garden Week.

Gardens are important not only to teach kids that there's a big wide world of nature outside the concrete confines of our city but to introduce children to the why's and wherefore's of growing things, even food and the good nutrition that comes from fresh, locally grown produce.

It's a bit of a struggle establishing gardens in the schools here in the District of Columbia. That's where the D.C. Schoolyard Greening organization comes in. And this year, taking a cue from California, where hefty amounts of funding are devoted to school gardens, we decided to designate one week in the year to promote the school gardening effort.

After months of planning and organizing, School Garden Week is here. D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty issued a proclamation, we held a garden photo contest and everything seemed to fall into place. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, D.C. Department of the Environment Director Howard S. Hawkins, Ward 4 D.C. Council Member Muriel Bowser--they all stayed to help hand out awards to the photo contest winners gathered at LaSalle Elementary School.

We had more than 100 entries from nine different schools. My rough estimate is that more than half the winners showed up yesterday to collect their prizes, including Grand Prize winner Nell Koring, an 11th-grader from Wilson Sernior High, shown here with Chancellor Rhee and Director Hawkins.

Tonight, we hold a panel discussion on how to create a school garden and work it into the curriculum. I'll be bringing the food...

Schoolyard Greening

Last year after building a big container garden at my daughter's charter school I got involved with a group called D.C. Schoolyard Greening. The organization, composed of several non-profit and government entities, is doing great things to promote gardens in D.C. schools as resources for learning, recreation and nutrition.

This year for the first time, Schoolyard Greening is sponsoring a week-long focus on gardening called School Garden Week. Modeled after a program in California (which gets millions of dollars in funding, by the way) this week of activities encourages teachers, students and parents to get outside and work in the soil. D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty has even issued a proclamation declaring the week of Oct. 15 - 20 as being devoted to school gardens.

The week kicks off Oct. 15 with a wetlands planting and garden tour at La Salle Elementary School. We're hoping the mayor will join several other city officials in attending.

On Oct. 16 there's a panel discussion on how to start and maintain a school garden. Several folks with long experience organizing gardens and community groups in the District of Columbia will be taking part.

On Oct. 18, Casey Trees is holding a "walk among trees" at Murch Elementary Schools. Casey Trees, which has worked with parent volunteers to plant dozens of trees on the Murch campus, is one of the prime movers behind D.C. Schoolyard Greening.

Oct. 19 has been designated "volunteer work day" at D.C. school gardens. We have dozens of volunteers looking for ways they can help with local gardens.

Then on Oct. 20, the fourth-annual bus tour of D.C. school gardens takes off, lunch included.

Also on Oct. 20, for the first time, there will be a "bike hop" of school gardens sponsored by the Women's Garden Cycle Project. I'm especially excited about this event because our garden at the Children's Studio School is one of the stops on the hop, and the women cyclists are just now on the homebound leg of an incredible tour of vegetable gardens and farms all the way to Montreal and back. (You can read about this marathon cycling adventure at their blog.)

Last but certainly not least of the garden week activities is a photo contest for all D.C. school children. Any child of school age, through high school, can enter favorite garden shots (no faces, please) and win a prize for herself and her teacher. I am working on this particular project with my garden partner at Children's Studio School, Elizabeth Wyrsch. So do by all means send us your garden photos. The deadline for entry is Oct. 1. You can go to the Schoolyard Greening website for complete details.

Oh, and we are scouting locations where we can display the winning photos if you have any suggestions.