Daytime in the Garden of Food and Children

Today my externship continued as I visited the Edible Schoolyard at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, CA. The Edible Schoolyard is a national pet project of the Chez Panisse Foundation (which has a mission to basically bring quality, nutritious, fresh foods to school lunches).

Early-morning view of the Edible Schoolyard (herb garden in the front!)

The garden contains a pond, a compost pile, a chicken coop (which I found out about later that afternoon), a greenhouse, and solar panels to (presumably) provide light in the evenings.

Edible Schoolyard pond (solar panel visible in upper right corner!)

Kids get to take a class once a week in either the garden (where food is grown for the kids to cook and eat) or the kitchen (where the kids cook recipes that include the food they grew). I got to sit in and participate in both types of classes. Woohoo!

The kitchen class was first: as I said, produce from the garden is used to prepare basic recipes. The kids (6th and 7th graders) do most of the prep work with real knives (which aren't that sharp) and other kitchen utensils, and follow the recipes (with assistance from the teachers and volunteers) while cooking on a nearby 2-burner electric stove. (Gas is always better to cook with, but God forbid if some overzealous or inattentive child accidentally sets him or herself on fire from the flames).

Edible Schoolyard kitchen classroom

Today we cooked vegetable fried rice, which included Napa cabbage, carrots, scallions, garlic, ginger, eggs, and Tokyo turnips (little white, round turnips)--everything but the ginger and the cooked brown rice was from the school garden.

(yes, brown rice...this was Berkeley, y'all).

The first class was a group of ELL (English Language Learner) students. The group was broken up into three sub-groups, each of which made their own batch of rice. Our particular subgroup was a mini-UN: students from Algeria, France, India, Norway, Eritrea, Peru, Dominican Republic. Most spoke English enough to get by, but one boy clearly told me (in response to a question) "I don't speak English." He was cooking his little heart out, though, language barriers be damned. They even set the table with napkins tri-folded in the water glasses...yes, I see a future in fine dining for this group!

All vegetable scraps were saved for the compost pile in the school garden, and kids were encouraged to clean as they went along (which is very important in any culinary career). While they took turns cooking, other members of the group set the table for the meal. The rice turned out very well (we ate with chopsticks), and leftovers were sent home in little Chinese takeout-style boxes.

We attended a school play that highlighted the importance of dreaming your reality. The script was a collaboration among the students in a drama class, and the teacher simply wrote the students's ideas in a script format, which they performed in full costume, and with a rather professional-looking set (which, I later found out, was lovingly done by the drama teacher's wife, who is an artist). The kids really got into the performance, although the jumble of ideas sometimes led to things being lost in translation. I had a flash of that scene in the Eddie Murphy movie Boomerang, where he visits a children's art class and thanks one girl for her interpretation of her collage (which he didn't understand at all). LOL

After the play, I sat in on a garden class. The garden was a hodgepodge of different fruits (including lemons, persimmons, figs), vegetables (including kale, chard, artichokes [!!!]), and herbs (including garlic, rosemary, sage). The colorful signs--some of which were bilingual were made by the kids to identify different plantings, and the whole garden showed signs of being cared for.

Sign for the garlic patch (the long shoots are garlic plants)

Bilingual (English/Chinese) garden sign

Today's class began with a lesson on mushrooms (I did not know that those little fuzzy white patches in dirt were actually pre-mushrooms: they give rise to the capped mushrooms that we know and (sometimes) love!) before they were divided into groups to perform various garden maintenance tasks: replanting seedlings in the green house; properly connecting the solar panel to the pond, and chopping fennel; weeding the herb garden; threshing and milling millet. I was in the herb garden group, and we pulled weeds from a stand of rosemary and a patch of various sage plants. While doing this, I heard some of the most interesting conversations. The most memorable was this:

Girl 1: A spider! Eww! I'm arachnaphobic!
Girl 2: I didn't know you were arachnaphobic.
Girl 1: Well, it may not be that serious, but I am afraid of spiders.

(yes...sixth grade, y'all. LOL).

I freely admit that I chuckled at this conversation.

After the garden class was over and tools were returned, chickens returned to the coop (yes, there is a chicken coop, and chickens are allowed to roam free during garden maintenance; most like to hang out around the compost area, and some of the kids pick the chickens up and carry them around as if they were cats or dogs...and the chickens let them. Wow.). The kids then returned back to the ramada (the main, round meeting area--it's visible in the garden picture posted earlier in this entry) for a rousing game of Garden Jeopardy. Team 1 managed to rack up 40 points to Team 2's 20 points before the bell rang for them to return to class.

I returned to the kitchen for the afternoon's class, which was also making vegetable fried rice. This particular group (and my subsequent subgroup) were smaller due to some kids attending a party for another student, so I did more hands-on prep than I normally would. The rice turned out very well for this group, and they had more leftovers to take home for the weekend since there wasn't enough people to eat it all in one sitting. I like the kitchen classes better than the garden ones because I get more one-on-one interaction times with the kids.

Because this garden is open to the public yet is for the children, people have to be admonished not to take things from the garden (you'd be surprised how many people feel that they can, because the garden is so accessible to the public).

"Do Not Pick" signs hanging on various plants and trees

Still, it's a nice place to see and it's even better when one can experience the kids really taking an interest in gardening and cooking, and getting the connection of where their food comes from before it gets to their plates.


It was a truly rewarding experience that nourished my spirit; I'd forgotten how much I missed teaching kids in that type of setting. I am definitely going back to volunteer there on one of my days off.

Thanks for stopping by.

T.