Winter harvest recipes

We are lucky to have a mild winter here in the Bay Area. With the combination of rainy and sunny days, our winter garden veggies are beautiful! Last week, Garden Club students harvested red cabbage, green onions, green garlic, cilantro, radishes and peas to make a delicious Crunchy Slaw. So many garden treats packed this yummy salad! Get the recipe at the bottom. It's delicious on it's own, in a whole wheat wrap, on tacos, on a sandwich... or? Lots of possibilities!

When Life Gives You Lemons...

When life gives you lemons... make lemonade!

All classes have enjoyed harvesting the bountiful lemons from our citrus orchard -- and squeezing the fragrant juice into pitchers mixed with water and simple syrup to make their own refreshing lemonade drink!

Winter Garden Bounty

Since they returned from the holiday break, kindergarten has been enjoying many winter harvests! That's the joy of the Bay Area weather -- a few frosts didn't harm our citrus, and they only made our broccoli sweeter.

Freshly picked mandarins!

Kindergarten harvests various citrus fruits for a taste test.

Broccoli made not be quite as popular as our juicy citrus, but kinder still enjoy it more than anyone would guess! When they harvest it themselves, they are much more open to trying it! A little ranch or teriyaki sauce for dipping is nice, too. 

Look at our beautiful broccoli plants! 

YUM!

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.