Garden Pizza Party!

Did you know that the EPACS garden has an oven? We have a beautiful earthen or 'cob' oven made of clay dug from the garden, sand & straw. You can read more about cob here -- it's a wonderful natural building material. 

At the beginning of November, I partnered with the EPACS Wellness educator, Cristina Cortez, and the wonderful team that she is a part of from Stanford's Early Life Stress and Anxiety Program (a part of Stanford University School of Medicine & funded by the Tipping Point Community) to host a big Garden Pizza Party.  We fired up the cob oven for the occasion! It takes a couple hours for the oven to get really hot. After it was nice & hot, we moved the coals out of the way to make room for cooking the pizzas. 

Students, family members, teachers & staff came out to make pizzas, grind wheat berries into flour, decorate candles, and make lavender play dough. It was quite the party! The awesome Susty after school program contributed a delicious tomato-kale pizza sauce and silky whole-wheat pizza dough. The party was lots of fun, very tasty & a big success!

Many thanks to our garden volunteers & supporters!

Over the last month, the EPACS garden has received lots of volunteer love!  At the end of October, volunteers from SAP, Adobe and Kaboom! created a beautiful new herb spiral:

And the wonderful, dedicated folks at Gamble Garden in Palo Alto donated nearly 100 new fall and winter plants for our garden. Fifth graders Jose, Alan and Alex helped plant the beautiful rainbow-colored swiss chard, tot soi and mustard greens. 

It's great to see the garden thriving, even as the days turn cold, windy & rainy! Many thanks to our volunteers & supporters! Want to get involved, too? Leave a note here!

Autumn Activites

It's starting to feel a little more like fall. Chillier mornings, a few days of light rain, changing leaves, pumpkins, persimmons... I love this time of year! And so do our students... especially if they are doing fun things like dehydrating persimmon chips or painting pumpkin art or making pumpkin cookies!

Fourth grade enjoys picking Hachiya persimmons the garden!

Cutting persimmons to go in the food dehydrator...

Persimmons ready to dehydrate!

Kindergarteners get into shapes as they design, cut out and glue their pumpkins on black paper!

Step one of 3rd grade's pumpkin art project: drawing pumpkins and painting them by mixing colors.

Next steps: cutting out their painted pumpkins & creating a night scene for their 'Moonlit pumpkin patch'. 

Adding final touches!

Fourth grade also made a yummy no-bake Pumpkin, Oat, Raisin Cookie! The recipe was super simple -- find it here.

Catching up in the 'new' school year!

Kindergarten students weighing a pumpkin that they harvested from the garden

Summer went by so quickly; it's hard to believe that we're 8 weeks into the school year and it's fall now!

Here are some highlights so far...

Kindergarten is getting acquainted with the garden. They LOVE visiting the garden and are full of energy! They have used their senses to explore the sights, smells, tastes, sounds and textures of the garden. They have used tools such as magnifying lenses, rulers and scales to get to know the garden and the garden produce better. And they have made some beautiful art to showcase their observation skills. Fun!

After visiting the garden chickens, kindergarteners made their own chickens!

After learning about what plants need to survive, and sprouting seeds in their classroom, kindergartners also made their own 'green house' to grow pea seeds at home over fall break.

A 'green house' with pea seeds ready to sprout!

decorating the 'green house'

First graders learned a lot about seeds -- they worked in teams to solve a sorting challenge to answer the questions 'Is it a seed?'

They learned about Johnny Appleseed, harvested apples from the garden apple trees and collected the seeds inside their apples to see if all apples have the same number of seeds. And they made their own 'seed heads' at the end of class to take home and watch grow!

A 'seed head'!

Second grade learned more about the parts of a plant, how to answer the question 'Is it a plant?' and also clarified the meaning of 'living vs non-living'.

plant part art

Students created collages of living and non-living things

Wow! That's a lot! Here are a few more highlights:

Fifth graders made applesauce from apples they harvested together. And they also harvested all the spent sunflowers so that we can save the seeds to plant again in the spring. We had some huge sunflowers!

Fifth grade chefs making apple sauce!

One of the many mega-sunflowers that fifth graders harvested!

It's hard to believe that we're already a quarter of the way through the school year! We're off to a great start in the garden and looking forward to a lot more adventures.

Wrapping up a school year...

The past weeks have been a whirl wind as the school year wraps up! This week's blog post is a quick round-up  of the garden activities that kindergarten, second grade, sixth grade and Garden Club have been enjoying in the last weeks before summer break.

Garden Club has been trying some new recipes using lots of spring crops! This week it was Brussels Sprouts! The stalks were nearly as tall as our students, but that didn't stop them from hauling them out of the ground, picking each little round sprout, and cooking them up. The students shredded the Brussels Sprouts and cracked open fresh macadamia nuts from our garden to make a yummy pasta dish similar to this recipe. Everyone gave it two big thumbs up! Who says kids won't eat Brussels sprouts?!

Garden Club harvested Brussels Sprouts!

Two thumbs up for Garden Club's whole wheat pasta with shredded Brussels Sprouts and Macadamia Nuts (both from the garden!)

 Kindergarten learned more about the garden by singing a song about the 6 parts of a plant. Then they made food art with examples of each part of a plant -- fruits, flowers, leaves, stems, roots and seeds. While snacking on their art, some students drew their own plants.

plant part art

kindergarteners draw and label plants

 The World Change Club came out to the garden and helped with numerous harvests! They washed and prepared kale for a yummy kale salad and lemons that family members will enjoy during the Science Showcase.

washing kale

Students also had the opportunity to learn all about chickens, to visit the garden chickens & give them a snack... and to make their own chicken art! Second grade even used the chicken eggs to make a healthy brown rice & veggie 'fried' rice!

kindergarten students feed the chickens some collard greens

chicken art!

Spring Potatoes & A Kick Off to 'Get Fit, Eat Healthy'

EPACS students spent last week focused on what it means to 'Get Fit & Eat Healthy'.  Garden Club 1st and 2nd graders spent Friday celebrating the week's theme by working up a sweat harvesting gem-like spring potatoes and preparing a healthy Mediterranean soup using the fresh potatoes and lots of other veggies.

Students were fascinated by the way potatoes grow under the ground and by the different colors of the potatoes . Back in January, EPACS 3rd and 4th graders planted four varieties of 'seed potatoes', pieces of potatoes that each contain at least one 'eye'.  Each eye has the ability to grow into a big bushy plant and produce lots of new potatoes.

Garden Club enjoyed the fruits of their labors by cooking up a quick & healthy Moroccan-Style Chickpea Soup using the new potatoes. The soup got two thumbs up all around!

Students enjoying their soup!

A delicious and simple soup! From Cook's Illustrated 'The Quick Recipe'. Garden Club also added 3 cut up carrots!

In addition to providing lots of great fodder for lessons about plant parts & cooking lessons, potatoes provide great lessons about history, biodiversity, health & nutrition. 6th grade students learned about biodiversity with this game from LifeLab, then discussed the value of having a diversity of plants, as well as a diversity within the plants that we cultivate in our school garden.

What other ideas or questions do you have?

It takes a village...

A rose blooms by the back fence

The garden received a lot of love over the last weekend of April! Nearly 200 volunteers of all ages descended on the garden to weed, plant, mulch, prune, build and repair. The volunteers were a part of the Beautiful Day weekend, a multi-church service project that took place at numerous sites throughout the area.

Winter squash seeds that volunteers planted have already sprouted!

Volunteers planted 12 varieties of heirloom tomatoes.

What a change! With a garden this size (nearly an acre!), it is hard to give it all the attention it needs! I certainly can't do it all -- that is why volunteer events like this, plus our monthly garden work day & the help of individuals during the week are crucial! If you have ever thought about doing some gardening, even if you're afraid you don't have a green thumb, let me know! We can always use the help -- and there are lots of different ways to get involved!

The whole EPACS community was astonished by the changes in the garden when they returned to school Monday morning -- in addition to all the hard work in the garden, the school had a new coat of paint, new benches and landscaping, new ceiling tiles and plumbing fixes, new murals and more! Incredible!

Here's a little round-up of what else we have growing in the garden right now -- it is getting more spectacular by the day as flowers open, seeds sprout and vegetables leaf out and grow taller. Come out and visit the garden and tag your photos on Instagram: #epacsgarden.

Lots of artichokes! Artichokes are a type of thistle.

The spring potatoes are almost ready to harvest.

An aloe plant blooming-- hummingbirds love these!

A cactus blooms.

First Signs of Summer

The garden continues to move toward summer! Come visit the garden to see the beautiful flowers in bloom and check out what's been recently planted. 

Columbine is blooming in the garden -- in many different colors

A foxglove flower greets guests as they enter the outdoor kitchen

This past week First and Second graders planted tomatoes in the garden. Have you seen heirloom varieties of tomatoes at farmers' markets or the supermarket -- or grown them yourself? Well, come July or August, the EPACS garden will have some beautiful green, purple, orange and yellow tomatoes thanks to our 1st and 2nd graders hard work. These varieties have interesting names that give us a clue as to their colors -- Pineapple, Cherokee Purple, Black from Tula, German Green, and Sungold. We'll be planting over 20 varieties of tomatoes in the EPACS garden this month!

As we plant summer veggies, we are also finishing up with spring plants. Garden Club students harvested and shelled the remaining crop of peas. And they made a few yummy batches of Kale Chips from our bountiful spring kale.

Kale Chips are easy to make: Heat your oven to 350 degrees. Remove the ribs from the kale, break each leaf into bite-sized pieces. Toss the kale pieces in a drizzle of olive oil and a pinch of salt or a sprinkle of parmesan cheese. Bake on a cookie sheet for about 15 minutes, or until the kale pieces are crisp. Enjoy!

First graders in Garden Class finished up their insect explorations by making and painting their own clay arthropods. Students used what they learned about insects, arachnids, other arthropods...as well as their wild imaginations to craft these creative critters! 

Third and Fifth graders learned about the amazing power of seeds. They dissected seeds, planted seeds, read about seeds, and ate seeds! The grand finale included making some no-bake seed cookies in the outdoor kitchen. Here's the recipe that got two thumbs up all around: