Restless Radishes

Parent representatives were doing some garden maintenance today and we noticed the radishes were ready now and wouldn’t wait until our next meeting to be plucked from the earth. Our Green LIONS Garden Group meets two times a month and sometimes the timing for harvesting doesn’t work out perfectly. We will happily store these for the next week for the students to sample. We left a few smaller ones to grow a little longer and to be pulled up by the students. Large radishes that are ready can get fiery hot in flavor if left too long in the earth, can split and just not taste too great. These radishes wouldn’t wait, but oh how pretty they are!

Goats Can Be Teachers Too

Maureen Anderson from Hearthside Farm and Tasha’s Own Soaps came with members of her family to share her Lamb to Shawl Presentation with the Green LIONS Garden Group on Monday afternoon. Ms. Anderson engaged the students with homesteading lessons and samples of the many items grown or created on her farm. Hearthside Farm raises sheep and goats and uses the wool for knitting and the goat’s milk for making soaps. Their Tasha’s Own soaps can be found at numerous retailers in the area, including Stoney’s right down the street from our school. See our link to her farm under our Green Links section.

Ms. Anderson shared lessons from her family’s sustainable lifestyle. She brought one of her goats to teach the students about all the gifts nature can offer us through its cycles. Her goats happily eat up all their kitchen scraps producing manure to fertilize their farm and then provide milk to make their creamy soaps. The fertilized soil grows wonderful organic vegetables for their family to eat and sell and the whole cycle starts over again.

She taught the students about the connection between where our food and clothing materials come from and how they’re grown and the impact it may have on our planet. She helped the students understand the importance of supporting local farmers and taking responsibility for trying to lessen the gap from farm to table. She also stressed the importance of eating seasonally as much as we can. Local food systems thrive when we commit to eating seasonally instead of buying food grown miles, even oceans away.

The students also had the opportunity to work with, not only a fresh piece of Tasha’s Own soap, but wool that Ms. Anderson’s family sheared, cleaned and dyed from their own sheep, turning them into....

.....a special gift to take home and share. Thank you to Hearthside Farm for a wonderful afternoon!

Tat Soi and Blogging

We harvested and sampled our tat soi and some of our swiss chard today. Students took home bags of tat soi to share with their families. If you’re new to tat soi, it’s similar to spinach so it can be eaten raw or cooked. If cooking, the stems can get a little chewy so some prefer to cut them out prior to cooking as shown above. Either chop the stems finely to add to your saute or stir fry, or compost them.

Students also posted on the blog for the first time today answering one of the following questions:
What have you learned so far about organic gardening and why is it important for the health of our planet?
What have your learned about the importance of recycling or water conservation?
What have your learned about eating healthy and why it is important to your body?

Stay tuned for delicious recipes for using tat soi.

Green Harvest

Our lettuce and arugula were ready to be harvested. The students sampled a lettuce bowl of mixed lettuces and arugula they grew themselves along with organic radishes and carrots, and New Earth Farm Farmer John's red peppers. We offered a Balsamic Vinaigrette and the recipe follows. There were smiling faces all around. The Garden Group members each took a bag of mixed greens home to share with their families.Balsamic Vinaigrette: Shake together in a tightly closed jar 3 T balsamic vinegar, 1 T Dijon mustard, 2 T extra virgin olive oil, 3 T canola oil, 1 T finely chopped fresh basil, salt and freshly ground pepper to taste, pinch of minced fresh garlic. Enjoy!

Nature-Inspired Holiday Turkeys

Our students repurposed pine cones dropped from neighborhood trees into natural holiday decorations in lieu of store-bought. Bringing natural elements into our homes can be calming and reconnect us to nature.

Learning About Water Conservation

Green LIONS members learned about water conservation and why it's important. Less than 1 % of all water on earth can be used by people. The rest is either salt water like in the ocean or permanently frozen. There are many small practices we can adopt that have a large impact on conserving water.

While we brush our teeth or wash our hands we can turn off the water. Simply turning off the water while we brush can save up to 8 gallons of water a day. That's over 200 gallons a month, enough to fill a large fish tank to house 6 small sharks!

We can choose showers over baths sometimes to save water.

Adding a moisture sensor to yard sprinklers can prevent sprinklers being used unnecessarily, when it is raining for example.

We can repurpose two plastic bottles by filling them with a few pebbles and then water to put in our toilet tank away from the operating mechanisms. This cuts down on water waste by tricking the tank into thinking it's full.

We can check for leaks in our tanks by dropping a drop of food coloring in the tank and then checking within 30 minutes to see if the color shows up in the bowl. If it does your tank has a leak and that can use up to 200 gallons of water a day.

Using the dishwasher has been shown to be more water efficient than hand washing, if the load is full of course.

It's important to wash only full loads in the washing machine too to conserve water.

Green LIONS Garden Group conserves water by using a rain barrel purchased from Lynnhaven River Now to supplement hose watering for our garden.

October Scarecrows!

All three of our garden beds received original scarecrows created by our Garden Group members. We divided up into three teams of mixed ages to create our garden sentinels and the students had a great time working together. Thank you to Mr. Shugrue for building our scarecrow frames.

Planting the Fall Garden

Farmer John Wilson with New Earth Farm came out to help the Green LIONS members and parents plant our Fall garden. Over three beds we planted broccoli, swiss chard, arugula, kale, radishes, lettuces, strawberries, collards, tat soi, and cabbage. We'll document changes in the garden over the next weeks in our garden journals while we wait to harvest our bounty. Check out our link to Farmer John's farm on this blog. Along with his produce grown using organic methods, he also sells compost and eggs. He volunteers his time to teach young people about the importance of growing and eating organically grown food.