a fantasy to inspire us

A Farm/School Fantasy; (you fill in the blanks.) Dec.5, 07
Winter is Dreamtime at Native Earth Teaching Farm by Rebecca Gilbert

The ____ school’s ___th grade takes a trip every year to ____. To raise money for this trip, they garden! Starting seedlings in the school’s small greenhouse from the middle of February through March is a nice taste of spring; it feels almost like going outside. There is a lot of math and science involved, including space and timing, because everything has to be ready for the plant sale in May. The students design advertising, figure out income and expenses, and staff the sale, which is promoted to parents and the wider community as a way to support our youth at their shining, healthy best. After the sale, family sized plots in the school garden are planted with mixed vegetables. Students are encouraged to demonstrate their skills at home also. In April, they were sent home with seeds and simple instructions for creating a small vegetable garden, along with a list of Island community gardening opportunities. The packet is called “Let your kid show you how!”
In June, the school garden plots are rented to parents, community members, and summer people. The rent is rather high, except for those who contributed an agreed upon amount of work in the spring (the affordable option.) Imagine being able to rent a ‘turn key’ garden already planted, thriving, and starting to produce! The summer gardeners then enjoy the vegetables the students have planted, plus additions of their own. In return, they gratefully water a long, heavily mulched, low maintenance bed at the center of the garden called the ‘thank you’ bed for the next year’s students, which contains potatoes, carrots, green onions, parsley, and a few perennials. Another issue for which summer gardeners must be prepared is that the gardens are still cranking when they must be tilled under in the beginning of Sept. Of course, the summer people are getting ready to return to their own schools off island, as ambassadors of community/school gardening. The ‘last hurrah’ of the summer garden is the ‘Pickle Party and Potluck,’ at which a local chef demonstrates how to make uncooked pickles and kraut, group kimchee is made and distributed, weeds are burned, and seeds and recipes are shared. This party has been known to cause people to change their ferry reservations!
In Sept, everything but the ‘thank you’ bed is tilled in by a local farmer hired to fertilize, lime, and plant winter greens. When school begins, the greens are already growing; they can be harvested through Dec. using Eliot Coleman’s latest low tech, low cost, low tunnel system; some can also be grown in the greenhouse. With roots from the ‘thank you’ bed, this is enough to get most of the new crop of ___th graders interested in the garden. The greenhouse is closed down right before the winter holidays, and rests till mid February when the cycle begins again.
The students have raised money for their trip, and met their goal of having at least one ‘school raised’ item at every lunch, even if it’s sometimes only parsley garnish, and they show a greater appreciation for the rest of their lunch and those who prepared it. Community members without children have a way to get involved and support their school. Teachers have a seasonally repeating program on which to build. Parents, seeing their kids eat more vegetables, are eating more too. Several local farmers get paid for honest work, which does not fall during their busiest season.
What a pleasant dream! What would it take to make it real? A few years, a stage at a time… but mainly, PLANNING. A successful grant writing team, a paid manager or tag team of part time managers, input from the state, some farmers, the schools, dedicated parents and adventuresome kids. It sounds doable. It sounds like a job for ___! (I would fill in this last blank with – IGI!)