Posted on 13 January 2010.
This past Friday the Re:Vision team, along with Nathaniel Corum and Josiah Raison Cain had the privilege and joy of spending a day with the good folks over at the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley. Our goal was to get hands-on experience and to learn about how the program works with the hopes of replicating it in the future as an integral part of our design competitions.
For those of you that aren’t familiar with the program, the garden was started back in 1995, by the Chez Panisse Foundation (funded by Alice Waters) to serve as a garden and a kitchen classroom for Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School. The garden began as an empty lot with just a cover crop for the first two years. Now it is an acre of land thriving with all types of vegetables, herbs, fruit trees and complete with it’s own chickens that provide not only fun for the students but eggs to the kitchen. We learned that the garden has a Rainwater Catchment System that harvests and stores 200 gallons of water for every inch of rain. The water is harvested from the rooftop of their tool shed and used to water the garden!
The entire garden is tended to by a small and talented staff and by the students. The students provide about 70% of the work done in the garden because it is a part of their classes, like math and the sciences. In the kitchen, students learn about how to use utensils, measuring cups, thermometers and simple tools like a mortar and pestle. My favorite piece is that they not only get to learn how to cook using recipes and food from the garden, but they end the lesson by sitting around a table together and enjoying the fruits of their labor. Unfortunately, the majority of students never get the opportunity to eat around the kitchen table as a family at home.
The staff (Marsha, Ben, Sasha and Shaina) greeted us graciously with wolverine buns from Cheeseboard, a bowl full of a type of tangerines, coffee and homemade lemon tea. After a few introductions, we got straight to work picking radishes and lettuce for our lunch. Then we cultivated a strip of land that was then planted with more radishes, the beautiful Romanesco cauliflowers, chicory and lettuce. We even fertilized the land with compost they make on site. All the while the chickens were running about and even helped us till the soil with their feet.
For lunch we ate a scrumptious bean soup the children had made in class while we were working in the garden, along with salad made from the ingredients we had picked earlier. The ginger cookies for dessert were as big as saucers and out of this world.
We reconvened in the garden to learn about mushroom cultivation. Ben Eichorn, an assistant garden teacher, taught us about the amazing properties of several types of mushrooms. I didn’t know this before, but mushrooms only flower when they know they have run out of room to grow and therefore will die soon. They flower to spread spores to perpetuate their species. Ben and Sasha then took us through the process of making our own oyster mushroom growing kits to take home with us using straw and mushroom spawn.
We ended the day discussing the issues around how to fund this kind of program in other schools. Ultimately you need people to champion the cause and to be the driving force for it to happen. We enjoyed our stay with the Edible crew and we encourage you too to visit.
