Potato Tower link to SF Chronicle article & Material lists

My colleague Emmanuel Coup (our webmaster and 7th and 8th grade Math teacher) and I are spending the summer trying to figure out how to build a garden at our school-- our building is rented (we're a private school) and the schoolyard is recently beautifully repaved and blackened concrete. So we'll have to pirate a site somewhere outside the school fence in the parking lot where gardening will be somewhat safe from wind and vandals. Or if that plan gets vetoed we're thinking container gardens that can be sent home w/ students as a long term homework project.

Emmanuel found this relevant article about potato towers.

His wife, Shirley Watts, a professional gardener, sent along this critical info. re. raised beds and container gardens:

Materials needed:
Redwood Boards: 22 boards 2x12x8 (rough RRO) @ $3.83 Linear Foot: $704

Hardware:
One 10lb box outside deck screws: $35 (make sure heads fit hardware)
12 Simpson ties (stair angle for inside corners # TA10Z): @$6 = $72
24 L Angle brackets (5-1/2”) by Stanley (for outside top & bottom of each joint): @$3 = $72
Flat 6” Stanley reinforcement hardware to reinforce sides: 24 @ $2= $48
Weedblock: One 4x50 roll @ $25 (may need to get at Home Depo)

Wine barrels/Large 15+ gallon pots: 2 (Home Depo or OSH or Rosenblum)
Soil: Davis St. Whole Earth Mix; 4cu yds@ $30/yd: $120


Tools needed for raised bed build date:
Electric Saw (need power outlet access)
Saw horses/table
Measuring tape
Electric drills (or battery powered)/bits
Screw drivers

Garden Anywhere Boxes for k-12

Curriculum idea for grades 1-8 @ schools addicted to concrete:
Every student has to find a recycled wooden or metal box or bin about the size of those used for cases of wine. When school starts we take field trips to local edible gardens in Berkeley (King's famous Edible Schoolyard, Le Conte, Willard where they've made a pizza oven out of mud), students drill holes in their boxes, build a compost and a worm bin to begin preparing rich soil with compost (preferably made at school from composted student lunches and yard waste). In December, we plant fava beans for the winter, to prepare for Feb./March plantings of onions, garlic, spinach, carrots, nasturtiums, lettuce, sweet peas, etc. Finale in May/June, after contests for most beautiful or bountiful box, each makes a short cooking demonstration movie in Spanish or French using harvest from his/her box.
Materials (goal: keep cost of whole project for 40 students to under $50):
soil
seeds
saw horses and recycled door as a work space to attend to boxes at school
Resource book: Garden Anywhere by Alys Fowler

Educational objectives: This is a project that can be linked to every class. For example, it could be a touchstone for every 8th grade class:
Geometry classes could build compost and worm bins;
Science could discuss plant guilds, nutrition, ecology, use of sustainable resources, English tie in could be eco-journalism, discussions around Fahrenheit 451or Brave New World
Algebra- word problems around energy conservation; volume
Spanish, Chinese, French: students will make their food demonstrations in a second language; literature and current event articles can also be a part of the reading and conversations in class
In art students can decorate the boxes

What's the point? to reengage with and care for plants and the soil, air, water needed to grow them well because they embody the processes that make it possible to take care of ourselves and our environment better. Garbage that becomes great soil for great edible plants remind us why recycling and composting is worth the daily discipline. At least that is a hypothesis. Let's test it out.

Plum leaves June

Wine dark leaves
boughs bear
the weight
as she,
our plum tree,
feeds the now:
shiny fruit,
red squirrel,
Anna's hummingbird,
Mrs. Robinson,
the man down the street
who grew up on Blake
and lives in the park
now

I wait
for plum butter
I'll make on
Bodie's birthday

Resources for teachers and students

Reading Terrain magazine's latest issues, got me going on a new list for students and teachers looking for sustainability links:
6-12th grade
•a visit to City Slicker Farm- good way to introduce idea of urban farming and local social justice issues specifically in regards to food security.

•Grist.org: an engaging environmental web site

•Terrain's "Teens with Green" reading list by Rachel Aronowitz:
Flush and Hoot by Carl Hissen;
Teen, Inc. by Stefan Petrucha;
Thoreau's Walden by John Porcellino (a graphic novel);
Generation Green: The Ultimate Teen Guide to Living an Eco-Friendly Life by Linda and Tosh Silvertsen;
My Space/OurPlanet: Change is Possible by the MySpace community with Jeca Taudte

•Brower Youth Award and Earth Island Institute Check out website/video and past award winners

K-5
• The Recycling Movie made by kids about recycling: request free copies by sending email to Craig Matis at cmatis@laurelschool.org or nclark@laurelschool.org
•Go to www.stopwaste.org to register for "Field trip program for Alameda County 4th and 5th grade classrooms focusing on the 4Rs - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Rot (compost) that includes a tour of the Davis Street Transfer Station to see recycling and garbage transfer operations, a presentation on the 4Rs and a hands-on activity.

All grades
• a visit to Martin Luther King School's Edible Schoolyard or at least to the website's inspiring videos featuring Ecole Bilingue Alumni parent Alice Waters talking about her idea for the schoolyard

•follow the Plastiki Expedition, the adventure of a boat built out of plastic bottles that will sail the Pacific to chronicle the plastic waste. This story and the New Yorker article about it can be paired with the new movie Addicted to Plastic (see below)
•Eco Center's Education links

Awesome Local Professional Development Ops in Sustainability:
•Center for Eco-Literacy
•Brower Center Programs and Exhibitions
•see the latest on-line essays written by Eco Literacy Staff and Fritjof Capra's article

Good brand new movies for grades 7-12 students:
Burning the Future see New York Times Review
Addicted to Plastic

West Berkeley Birds

October's an awesome month in Northern California- cool nights and days no hotter than mid 70's. Birds are busy moving through. A robin walked in our door, was looking for crumbs under our dining room table and flew out when I protested, like he knew where he was going.

I've noticed several new birds I hadn't seen before. Here's Jacks and my latest list of October sightings for our neighborhood:

08
European Starling - Curtis St. Oct. a crowd migrating?
Scrub Jay - Derby St. Oct.
Bushtit - several in our backyard Bay Tree

07
Cooper's Hawk - Blake St. telephone wires, Oct/Nov.
Lesser Goldfinch - 10 + October/November our backyard Bay Tree
Orange Crowned Warbler - Plum Tree

Really Slowing Time

Since last post we have a new baby. With my new charge I am busier than ever but not working so maybe a little writing can happen. And what I am into now is food. Really slow food-- pretty au courant-- yet I am remembering my French exchange mom in the summer of 1984 who spent 2-3 hours a day preparing and cooking lunch for us in her modest kitchen. We ate dishes of celery baked au gratin or maybe biftek and homemade french fries always followed by a frisee salad made from unusually bitter greens and then a cheese plate and a fruit plate. My French sister Valerie and I woke late -- around eleven or noon while our mom was at the marche buying the fresh produce, made ourselves hot chocolate for dipping our pain au chocolat then an hour later returned to the kitchen table for the event of the day: dejeuner, a serious undertaking. I soon learned that if I ate everything I was truly beloved by all. The pace was slow. We slept a lot. From midnight to noon, woke, ate, ate again and then napped with the shutters fast shut against the searing Avignon sun. Dinner was in front of the TV watching dubbed Dallas reruns while eating charcuterie, fresh baguettes and more frise.

Ironically, Valerie chose that summer to take out her teen rebellion as a food war. She resisted everything yummy and homemade. She was working on losing weight off her shapely hips while I gained 10 pounds-- easily lost when I returned home and spent the fall eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on wonder bread.

My idea of slow means trying out a cool new recipe for cranberry shelling beans bought fresh and boiled briefly then marinated in olive oil, lemon, garlic, parmesan cheese and basil and mixed with steamed haricot vert. It means taking my toddler to the market, discussing the meal with him in the check out line and then making it with him. Even better our neighbor Ginny brought us stalks of her garden's collards and we prepared them from scratch. Our plum trees produced several gallon tubs of vanilla plum butter that we swapped for apricot jam from our other neighbors. Steve, the artist up the street shares his raspberries strawberries and peaches with us as we stroll by, Pretty cool for gardens the size of a large living room. Needing space--emotional or physical-- I dream of building vertical with fruit trees and bean stalks. It's not going to save the world as some think, but it definitely can make a slow year happily slower-- and it is community to be proud of.

The Bay Now

My son and I head down to the Berkeley Marina every other day because it's how Jacks falls to sleep calmly for a mid-day nap. In the last several months it was always about visiting the boats-- as much for me as the baby because it helps me remember my father and our family sloop. Often the loop around the Berkeley Yacht Club parking lot inspired some needed grief for may dad, especially when on a Friday a stiff wind lifts and heels a J120 and its racing crew as it rounds the marina's breakwater. I like to think also that I'll be able to raise my son in the multi-generational tradition of my Long Island Sound family, sailing big boats, racing and cruising.

Two weeks ago, our little Marina trip down the road was met with the white suits of the clean up crews. The 58,000 gallons of oil from our recent spill had been swept by wind and tide to our coastline, and the marina became the center of the Bay's clean-up effort. Birds we had come to take for granted in the past had become symbols of universal grief and guilt. And this time I cried not for my dad, but for these birds, the most visible and vulnerable to the spill. No one was on the bay: it smelled like oil. The bay was beautiful and empty as long as I kept my car window closed. I told my students the next day that we will be one day as the bay's wildlife is now; actually, we already are, only we aren't breathing liquid oil just living off it surreptitiously. It's telling that the best way to put my son down for a nap is by driving because, after all, he spent far too much time in a car already in his short life, even though our family drives less than 40 miles a week.