Category Archives: Curriculum

A Fresh Start for Fall

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Seeds-from-the-SunIt’s almost time for the Open House for the new and returning Dirt to Dinner families. There’s a lot of work still to do to get ready but I’m excited to be getting the Fall program going. This session we are expecting a dozen families. Half were in the Spring program and half are new. We’ll have a balanced group as far as boys and girls and the ages will range from five to eleven.

SpiderMelonIn between meetings we’ll communicate by email and our Google group again this session since it seemed to work well in the Spring. We’ll pass on the Ning this time but we are keeping the accounts with VoiceThread since I know I will use it and we hope more of the kids will be involved in making VoiceThreads this session.

We’ll be rotating each family through ten different areas of responsibilities to help the kids personally experience the interconnectedness of all the systems working in the garden. I predict Worm Wrangler will be a pretty popular one. I am also looking forward to seeing what the kids do when it’s their turn to be the Journalist.

Dried-BeansThe Open House will also include a scavenger hunt to find various kinds of seeds around the garden. I went through earlier today with a camera and came up with twenty different kinds visible on, in or around the plants, if you include the potatoes. It will surprise me if the kids find all the ones that I did, but it won’t surprise me if they come up with something I didn’t. New eyes are forever seeing things in the garden that I seem to miss looking at it every day.

I also have seeds on hand for the kids to plant if they would like. It’s always fun to start some seeds in the dirt at the beginning of the project. And I have a lot of seeds available for them to just explore, compare and add to seed starting jars to take home with them.

End of the Season

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Ready-to-GrowThe garden is quiet now that the last session of the Spring 09 Dirt to Dinner project is done.

Real-World Wide Web

Real-World Wide Web

We explored the interconnectedness of the food webs we participate in every day. Latecomers spent part of the afternoon asking why we all had on nametages that said things like “Flowers,” “Oak Tree,” “Earthworms” and “Cougar.”

We also dug the potatoes that have been growing in the black nursery cloth circles since the start of the program. The plants had long ago bloomed and were mostly ready for us.

Washing the Dirt Off Dinner

Washing the Dirt Off Dinner

There were lots of the red-skinned potatoes with a blush color inside. I hope the folks at Common Ground know what they were because we liked them and they might work for next year’s Red White and Blue Potato Salad. They kept their color and held up nicely when we cooked them for the Balsamic Green Beans and Potatoes.

Some of the kids chose to pull the plants with their *many* green tomatoes and take them home to hang for ripening.

Roma Tomato Prepped for Dry Hanging

Roma Tomato Prepped for Dry Hanging

We are experimenting with three or four different ways to ripen green tomatoes and I’m curious to see what works best. Right now my favorite is to put them into a paper bag with a ripe apple or tomato and to let them redden that way. We are testing the plant hanging method, sunny window sills, newspaper wrapping and apple-in-a-bag. We’ll let you know how it comes out!

We also stabilized the gourd trellis and planted the gourds, picked the Principe Borghese and Costaluto Genovese tomatoes that were ready and explored the Ice Box watermelon ripening that has happened so far. (Not there yet, but close and already quite tasty!)

Everyone Loves the Eating Part!

Everyone Loves the Eating Part!

Today’s lunch included Balsamic Green Beans and Potaotes, Red White and Blue Potato Salad, Spinach Salad with Goat Cheese, Egg Salad, Tomato Basil Mozzarella, Roasted Tomatillo and Avocado Salsa.

Thank you to everyone who made this year’s program possible, including our generous donors at Seeds of Change, The National Gardening Association Seed Donation Program, the generous and helpful folks at Bauer Lumber and Mark Lassen at Lassen Construction.

Bugs, Bees and Birds

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Special-GuestToday at Dirt to Dinner we had a special visit from entomology professor Helda Morales from Chiapas, Mexico and two of her colleagues. Professor Morales loves bugs and studies both integrated pest management and the social aspects of pest control. She would like to start her own educational garden project for children when she returns to Mexico.

Our other special guest has feathers, but no name that I know of. She is an orphaned

Bug Collecting

Bug Collecting

baby jay Mackenzie is nursing. And she was a perfectly integrated pest manager for us today! One of the activities in the garden this morning was discovering the wide variety of insect life that calls our garden home. Some of these are beneficial to our crops, like the enormous carpenter bees we often see flying around our tomato plants, others are more destructive and are eating some of the plants we are growing. And some of them were beneficial to Miss Jay. They became her lunch!

Taming the Jungle

Taming the Jungle

The garden is filling out beyond our expectations and looked something beyond lush on over toward jungly when everyone arrived today. One of the visiting professors taught us how to tell the productive branches from the extra, leafy branches of our tomatoes plants and lots of pruning and tying and thinning out commenced. We are having good luck staking our determinant varieties with split bamboo and various types of plant ties. And now the garden beds will have lots more light and air and the plants growing under or around our tomatoes will thanks us.

We also added drip irrigation for over half of the big growing area! (Thanks, Ken!) That will be another big step in keeping our plants healthy and happy. Tomatoes, and many other garden vegetable plants, stay much healthier when you are able to water in a way that doesn’t get their leaves wet. Drip irrigation also uses less water and prevents soil compaction so I’m excited to start using it as much as we can.

Baby Bird Bugs

Baby Bird Bugs

Now that we are turning the corner into Summer and have just three Dirt to Dinner sessions remaining in the Spring program, I’m happy to report that the kids are very enthusiastic about seeing and working in their growing beds. They are really enjoying the meals they are able to prepare during the sessions using as much food as possible right out of the garden. And they seem comfortable and at ease with both the process and the work of growing food. Today they examined squash flowers and peeked under the dirt at the developing potatoes. They did multi-sensory explorations of some of the plants. They made delicious salsa in both mild and spicy varieties. They harvested chard and radishes and onion and salad greens and pulled spent broccoli and spinach. They started a new compost bin and added a new layer to the worm condo and flopped down around the puppy box to cool off in the shade.

It was a good day in the garden. :-)

From Grounds to Ground

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Ground from Grounds

Ground from Grounds

I’ve been to a lot of Starbucks’ in the last couple weeks. I’m collecting coffe grounds for an experiment in one of the growing beds. Actually, I was going to compost the grounds along with some leftover sod the neighbor shared with us, and then add lots of compost to the growing bed, months from now or even next year when everything was ready. In the mean time, the dry and fragmented growing bed has some tomatoes and lots of winter squash varieites in it and they were going to need mulch and a lot of water to make it through the Summer.

Half-way through setting up the new compost bin, it struck me that maybe we could use the coffee grounds and the sod *as* the mulch while they were composting themselves into a new and improved growing medium for next year. Now, don’t try this at home yet. This may turn out to be like the time I had the great idea to butter the toast before I put it in the toaster oven hoping for a garlic bread kind of effect and the whole thing caught fire and had to be dropped out the second story window into the snow to save the rest of the apartment. But this seems, at the very least, much less likely to burst into flames if unsuccessful.

I gathered seven Starbucks-worth of coffee grounds. Which is an amazingly small amount at some stores. I’m sorry, but how could you possibly be selling coffee all day in a Starbucks and *not* have coffe grounds? I was turned away cold from store 5920 where they said they didn’t have to save their coffee grounds for customers. But most of the stores were happy to oblige and many of them even insisted on carrying heavy bags loaded with grounds out to my trunk. Thank you, Starbucks!

Caffeinated Tomatoes

Caffeinated Tomatoes

I had six or seven rolls of unwanted sod to go with the grounds. I spread out the grounds around the already planted tomatoes and squash mounds and raked them across the top of the soil we are hoping to improve. Then we covered the grounds with the unrolled sod, grass-side down, and watered the whole thing in. We plan to cover the area with another layer of coffee grounds and a mulch/compost from Kellogg’s called N’Rich. It will add some much needed variety to the soil with it’s bat guano, kelp, chicken manure and worm castings.

Then we’ll let the thing sit and the squash vines can crawl all over it and hopefully the tomatoes will grow in spite of what my grandmother always said about coffee causing stunting in the young. ;-) The idea is that the coffee layer will seep into the existing soil attracting worms who supposedly love coffee grounds. And maybe all that nitrogen will even warm things up enough that the sod layer will break down right there on the ground under the N’Rich and the squash will shade the whole thing and keep it from drying out while it’s magically converted into good growing soil.

We’ll put a shovel in it in the Fall and let you know what we’ve got. And if this year’s pumpkin pie keeps the kids from sleeping, we’ll all know why.

May Dirt to Dinner Update

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Sprouting and Growing    Sprouting and Growing

There’s no doubt that the garden is starting to fill out nicely. If I hadn’t noticed it myself, the evening parade of dog walkers would have been happy to remind me.

We continue to receive attention and even gifts from neighborhood well-wishers. We now have two new lavender plants, starts from lavender bushes up the road that attract several different types of bees. We have a new moisture meter, which is addicting to use and is a huge help in watering. The small horseradish we were given has turned into an enormous pot of lush leaves and roots. And the seed donation from Seeds of Change has arrived with many interesting varieties we may want to try.

Bauer Lumber in Mountain View has also been very generous with donations of scrap wood that has come in handy several times already and which will be used to complete the potato bed as the hills get higher.

Thanks everybody! It’s wonderful to have your support.

Easter Egg Radishes make delicious pickles

Easter Egg Radishes make delicious pickles

In the kitchen, I have finally perfected my radish pickling brine recipe and can’t wait for everyone to try it out the next time we meet. It’s a mix of mostly sea salt, apple cider vinegar and tamari and it tames the stronger radishes in a way I hope the kids will like. Oh, and did I mention that recipe also uses a pinch or two of suagar and a swirl of honey? That could be part of what’s helping smooth it out. Delicious!

The January planting of shelling peas is just about done producing and we are moving on to pick the February shell peas and the snap peas. I’m sure people walking past the other side of the fence think we are growing the world’s tallest Snap Peas. Little do they know the peas are started in raised beds that are three feet tall. I won’t tell if you won’t.

Eight Foot Tall Snap Peas

Eight Foot Tall Snap Peas

The broccoli is also still producing nice side shoots, but will flower if given half a chance. The Broccoli Raab the kids planted in their individual beds is also prone to flowering. I’m keeping the flowers trimmed to see if it will go back to making more broccoli or not.

Intensive Planting to the Max

Intensive Planting to the Max

Some of the individual planting beds are small jungles at this point. Remind me to go over plant spacing with the kids again. :-)

This one has carrots, radishes, beets and tomato plants–and that’s just in the first two square feet!

Square Foot Patchwork

Square Foot Patchwork

These will be a wonderful experiment since they are all planted differently with more or less attention to the spacing ‘suggestions’ we used at planting time. Here’s one bed that was planted with careful attention to the square foot measures that gives it a visual patchwork look that many of our visitors find appealing.

I wish I could keep the rest of the garden looking that nice and neat!

 

 

Circle of Pollinator Attractors

Circle of Pollinator Attractors

We have added a few more flowers to our pollinator collection, a blue basil, some coreopsis and others. And we have our first potato plant flower bud! I wonder what it will look like? I’m actually not sure at this point which sack of potatoes is which, so I’m not sure which kind of bud this will be. I hope Mackenzie remembers or we may not know until it’s time to pick the potatoes.

The blue potatoes sent up blue sprouts, which I would never have expected.  I didn’t even recognize them as sprouts when they first came up because they looked so dark against the soil and compost. Who knows? Maybe it will have blue flowers as well!

First Spud Bud

First Spud Bud