The Kennedy Longfellow School Garden

The Food Project, Fish Markets and Seed Balls

2010-08-17T12:31:00.000-07:00

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

2010-08-02T13:30:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-07T13:41:00.000-07:00

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!

2010-04-10T11:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-11-24T12:28:00.001-08:00

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

2009-11-05T10:49:00.000-08:00

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!

2009-09-22T14:22:00.000-07:00

Check out this great video about the Citysprouts program -

Idea for a garden digging box

2009-09-02T06:31:00.000-07:00

At the back of the garden we have an area which as become the "digging pit" - kids always gravitate to that spot to dig in the dirt. The problem is, the soil in our garden has a lot of broken glass in it, so digging is a real safety hazard.

A recent visit to Drumlin Farm revealed a good solution to our problem - the Drumlin Learning Garden features a sturdy raised bed with just plain dirt in it - and a bunch of trowels and old flower pots. Kids gather round there constantly to dig and play - and it's just the right height to have fun.

We're looking into building the same thing in our garden. Stay tuned!

Below: Drumlin Farm digging box

The digging pit area at the garden (before our mural was painted!)

Garden walls bloom with our new Mural!

2009-08-17T06:54:00.001-07:00

It's mid-August and the garden beds are full of greenery and lush vegetables! We had been talking for some time about a project to paint the boring grey cement walls that create the boundary for the garden against the school - finally we found a weekend and went for it!

Our local Sherwin Williams store on First Street was very generous and donated lots of paint and painting supplies for the mural. Thank You Sherwin Williams.

Then community members from both Kennedy Longfellow School as well as East Cambridge Family Group community turned out in numbers to get the mural started. Cambridge School Committee member Joe Grassi provided loads of icy cold lemonade, and lots of neighbors stopped by to ask about the project and to admire the transformation of those grey walls into a beautiful landscape of flowers.

We were very lucky to have local artist Bethany LeSager at the helm providing artistic direction and planning for all the eager (and many little!) hands pitching in.

After several hours in the garden on Saturday morning, Bethany, Alister and Garden manager Caitlin worked on the finishing touches on Sunday.

A big Thank You to everyone who came out to support this project. We really had a great time.

Photos below - top to bottom: The before picture, marking corn, helpers, more helpers, the panoramic view

Summer Internship Begins!

2009-06-26T08:13:00.000-07:00

Five Kennedy-Longfellow middle school students have been chosen to participate in the CitySprouts summer internship: Nathan Harbinson, Tommy Ward, Hannah Correia, Diana Depina Barbosa and Ivan Norman (left to right). We began June 22nd and will be working and learning in the garden every week Monday - Thursday, 9:00 - 12:00, until July 16th.

Thank you to all of the K-Lo student applicants!

Here are some pictures from the first week:

Summer Drop-In Hours

2009-06-26T08:11:00.001-07:00

Garden Drop-In hours for the summer are 4:00 - 5:30pm on Mondays. Family, friends and neighbors are welcome. Children under 10 must be supervised by an adult. See you there!

2009-06-08T07:00:00.000-07:00

We've been having a great time in our gardening class at the KLS CitySprouts Garden. It's hard to believe this is our last session this week already.Unfortunately, it looks like it will be a rainy day. We were lucky that we only had one other rainy day - our first class! Since then we had a fun time with 9 young gardeners.

Here's what we did:

We planted marigolds and beans.
Everybody chose a plant to follow and put their name on a stick next to the plant.
We created Gardening Journals and worked on them during each class.
We planted a Budlia (Butterfly bush)
We did a soil test but putting soil in small jars with some water. When we came back the next week, Caitlin explaned how the soil settles in layers to show what is in the soil.

Over the summer each CitySprouts garden will be taken care by middle school students who will be taking part in a great summer intership program. Students come and water the garden and keep everything going until it's time to come back in September and celebrate the garden harvest.

Kennedy Longfellow School classes have also been enjoying the garden - The Junior Kindergarden Class visited the garden recently release some butterflies that they had been caring for in their classroom.

These photos of the garden taken by Photographer Megan George. Enjoy!

Garden Drop-In begins!

2009-05-06T06:32:00.000-07:00

Every Monday from 2:00 - 3:30, the Garden will be open for volunteer drop-in time. This is a great opportunity for families, friends and neighbors to come help out and get your hands dirty! We will have activities such as planting, weeding, watering, harvesting, cooking and doing art projects. If you would like more information, please contact the Garden Coordinator, Caitlin Rogers, at crogers[at]citysprouts.org

Planting beans, marigolds and some purple pansies

2009-05-05T14:32:00.001-07:00

Today we had a great "Little Sprouts" class with the Community School program. 10 students joined us on a wet but warmish afternoon. We started by planting beans and marigolds in a pattern (bean, marigold, marigold, bean) in long planter trays, sitting outside but underneath the school entrance area to avoid the rain. Then it looked a bit brighter so we walked around back to the Garden where friends planted more marigolds and some purple pansies, watered the new plantings, and also listened to a great gardening tale from the Frog and Toad stories - the one where Toad yells at his seeds to grow! We didn't have to do any yelling - everything is growing really well in the Kennedy Longfellow garden. Next week we hope to make some planters and see plant two Clematis vines that will be beautiful in the summertime.

About this Blog

2009-05-04T00:48:00.001-07:00

The Kennedy Longfellow School Garden is coordinated by CitySprouts, a year-round garden program in Cambridge, MA that partners with teachers and other educators to develop and utilize outdoor classrooms in 10 public schoolyards.

Welcome to the Kennedy Longfellow Garden Blog

2009-05-04T00:44:00.001-07:00

We're excited to see the Kennedy Longfellow CitySprouts Garden bloom this year. Stay tuned to this blog for lots of updates from the garden, sponsored by CitySprouts!