The Food Project, Fish Markets and Seed Balls

By now we're in the last leg of the 4-week middle school internship. It has flown by! Thursday will be our last day together in the garden. Here's what we've been up to lately.

We went on a field trip to Lincoln to help out on the Food Project's farm.





We visited fish markets, grocery stores and corner stores on Cambridge St. in attempt to learn more about the realities of our food system.







We hosted a community service group from Andover, MA and built compost sifters and made seed balls with clay, compost and water!

A Taste of the Internship: Session Two

The CitySprouts internship for youth ages 11-14 years old officially began at Kennedy-Longfellow last Monday, July 26th. We will be meeting together in the mornings for four weeks to take care of the garden & learn about growing & eating food.

On the 2nd day we ate fresh carrots and made ranch dip using herbs (pictured below). We also made basil pesto, but failed to take any pictures of it!

One of the lessons covered so far was plant life cycles. The students divided into two teams and mapped out the stages of growth for two different plants: radishes and strawberries. The steps were given to them in random order and the challenge was to place them correctly from beginning to end of life cycle: seed, new shoot, mature plant, flower, bee, fruit, dying plant. Strawberries are considered a true fruit botanically, whereas radishes represent a plant that produces an edible root. In the case of radishes, we eat the plant before it ever produces a flower.


This week we are going on two field trips: The Food Project in Lincoln and First Church Homeless Shelter in Cambridge.

In other news, we noticed a baby mockingbird and its mother today in the garden. It's nice to know the garden is starting to act as habitat for wildlife in the neighborhood.

Heat wave & new website

The past week has been an all out nightmare for the gardens. No rain & consistent 90 degree temps. However, our garden has fared pretty well in comparison to other schools such as King & Amigos, which has extremely dry conditions. Fortunately, some of the students attending East End House's summer camp at Kennedy-Longfellow have helped with watering and college volunteers.

Here's a list of what's growing right now to make up for the lack of pictures!
Strawberries, tomatoes, garlic, kale, collards, marigolds, herbs, carrots, pumpkins and newly sprouted cucumbers, zucchini, beans, okra, cilantro, callaloo & basil.

Also Citysprouts has a new website with a great info page on the Kennedy-Longfellow garden. Check it out by going to "What We Do" and clicking on "See gardens": www.citysprouts.org

We're back!

In case you're wondering what 2 yards of compost looks like, here it is. We had a delivery truck from Cambridge Bark & Loam come today. I'm hoping this will boost the soil quality at the K-Lo garden as we had some problems last year with blossom-end rot and root compaction. I am also adding a NE nutrient blend this spring.

The truck dumped our compost on the sidewalk outside the garden so we used wheelbarrows to put it on a tarp this morning. We would have mixed some into the beds but the soil is still wet today from rain. Here is a pic of the parent/kid volunteers that helped out (pile is gone)!

And some spring flowers that we planted in the fall with Mr. Kelly's JK class...

Looking back on October apple pressing

October was a month of non-stop apple pressing in the school gardens. Classes came out to learn how to make their own apple cider.



To make the apple cider, we used a fruit press. Fruit and cider presses separate fruit solids, such as the skin and seeds, from the fruit juice.

While apple juice is filtered, unfiltered apple juice is called apple cider.



Making cider

1. The first step involved cutting the apples and removing the apple cores.

2. Next, the apples were passed through an apple grinder. This step compresses the apples so that the juice is easier to extract from the solids.

3. The crushed apples were pressed in a cider press. This involved placing the fruit in the juicing cage, laying wooden blocks on top of the apples, and turning the silver ratchet handle to extract the juice.

4. The juice funnels into a the container at the bottom of the press, and we enjoyed the most important step of the process: drinking the cider! It was wonderful to enjoy this 100% fresh and natural apple cider, without any added sugar or preservatives! Read more about the nutritional difference between juice and fruit drinks.

Thanks to Annabelle Ho :)

Summer Recap

Here are some wonderful photos from the middle school summer internship in the garden. The students learned about growing food, cooking and nutrition, identifying plants and insects, and taking care of a garden. We took field trips to Community Servings in JP, Gaining Ground Farm in Concord, and the Food Project in Roxbury. We were lucky to have a weekly intern from the high school and a visiting staff member from the Urban Ecology Institute. One of the highlights was when UEI showed us how to use data loggers to measure light and temperature in the garden!

Check out this great video about the Citysprouts program -