We've had a great season of growing food, growing kids, and growing community at the University Place Elementary school garden! This fall, 13 classes at UP joined us for bi-weekly educational activities in the garden. Pre-K through 5th graders helped plant and tend the raised garden beds at their new school, while learning about the garden ecosystem around them. The garden was a beautiful addition to the school, and produced quite a lot of food for such a small space! The UP Farm Stand started up on October 27th and continued every week until Dec. 15th. Produce was harvested from both the original UP garden site in Forest Lake and the raised beds. Parents, school staff, and the surrounding community came out to purchase a bounty of fresh vegetables - collard greens, mustard greens, swiss chard, head lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, cilantro, dill, spinach, salad mix, and bok choy.

We'll take a short break for the holiday season and return for another year of garden education in 2012! Stay tune for more updates!

EDUCATIONAL OUTREACH

Students go on a "card hike" in the garden, making and recording observations and tasting when asked!

5th graders visit the collards patch and make observations about the insects eating the leaves.

3rd graders from Ms. Keene's class check out the bok choy.

PreK kids go on an ABC hunt in the garden.  H is for hose!

4th graders from Ms. Whitsey's class work together to prepare bok choy slaw from ingredients from the garden!

3rd graders from Ms. Burnette's class grind sesame seeds, grate carrots, and make a dressing for the bok choy slaw.

3rd graders from Ms. Burnette's class use the box grater to tackle the carrots!

4th graders from Ms. Whitsey's class eating the final product!

For their final garden lesson, students engaged in a heated game of garden jeopardy. 

UA students from the Honors College Food and Community class play Jeopardy with the 3rd graders.

SALAD DAYS

Our supplementary program "Salad Days" was a great success! We visited 9 classrooms and served students a fresh salad made with garden produce, while demonstrating food preparation techniques and talking about healthy eating.  Here, Kindergarten students enjoy their garden snack!

"Salad Days" with the 2nd graders from Ms. Peoples' class.

UP FARM STAND

This season, 3rd graders from Ms. Burnette's class were our farm stand leaders. They helped record transactions, make change, bag produce, and recruit customers to the stand. 

3rd graders help bag produce for a waiting customer.

Lettuce, bok choy, swiss chard, oh my!

Root crops abound!

Fresh broccoli heads for sale!

Lettuce, broccoli, mustards, radishes, chard, and the season's first cabbage!

Farm stand in action! UA student looks on.

Enterprising 3rd graders recruiting customers!

We are excited to report that our garden program at University Place Elementary was awarded the "Vlasic Farmer's Garden Grant" by the National Gardening Association! This is the second honor that we have received from the NGA. Last year, our program was awarded the "Youth Garden Grant".  As part of the Vlasic grant, we were given a host of gardening materials and tools, including a raised bed kit, a Grow Lab, and a composter.  We are thrilled to have our program recognized once again! Thank you NGA!

The garden at our original site is officially planted for fall! Thanks to the help of the Honors College Food and Community course, the "Wednesday Weeders" group, and other community volunteers, the garden has been replanted with lots and lots of food!  We were happy to make the transition from summer to fall crops, and are excited about including the produce grown at the original site in the upcoming Farm Stands at Stillman Heights. The site continues to be a bright spot for our tornado-affected Forest Lake neighborhood.

Planting collard greens in the main plot.

More collard greens...

Planting the rainbow bed with lettuce, spinach, salad mix, and mustard greens.

Thanks to the help of our dedicated volunteers, we finally erected a storage shed for all of our implements! It took two days to build and lots of hands to keep the pieces from flapping in the wind.

Putting on the final touches...

We've had an exciting couple of weeks of educational activities in the garden! University Place students have been planting, watering, learning about seeds, and making their very own garden maps! Thanks to the planting skills of pre-K through 5th graders, our seven new raised beds are filled with a variety of fall vegetables - lettuce, spinach, rainbow chard, bok choy, collard greens, cilantro, cabbage, carrots, radishes, mustard greens, and broccoli.  After only 3 short weeks, the plants have grown tremendously, and a few things are even ready to harvest! Looks like we'll be having our first farm stand soon!

Rashmi helps 3rd graders plant collard greens. The little white roots are especially intriguing!

A new addition to our garden space this year is "Mother Oak Tree". We meet here before every garden lesson! Here, Josalyn and Rashmi show 3rd graders the garden tools.

Pre-K students shell, count, and sort black beans, purple hull peas, and pinto beans from the UP summer garden. They learn how to group the beans by color, shape, and size.

Pre-K students, Jayla and Jazmine, pose in front of their sorted beans.

Seed sorters in action!

2nd grade student investigates the cilantro while making her garden map. Students learned about map symbols, direction, and measurement during this activity.

Excited Kindergarten students hunt for their names amidst the rapidly growing vegetables. The large lettuce heads were hiding their popsicle sticks! 

Pre-K students check out the plants and the new drip irrigation system (thanks Nucor!). 

We've got a brand new batch of UA students who will be working in the garden this semester! Students enrolled in the Honors College class Food and Community will complete a weekly service-learning component in the garden at University Place School and be involved in the DCGP's other educational and community food outreach projects. This week students got a chance to pot up strawberry plants, pick peas, and weed. Over the coming weeks, they'll be helping to dismantle the summer garden and prepare for fall plantings.

Elyse and Meridith pick crowder peas.

The zinnias are our summer heroes! They can endure the heat and the bugs!

Merritt tackles that pesky crab grass!

Since University Place School was destroyed during the storm, we'll be continuing our garden outreach with University Place students at their new Stillman Heights location. Nucor Steel has generously stepped up to be our community partner and is covering the cost of the raised bed construction. Work began on the beds this week and topsoil was delivered this morning by our friends over at J3 Organics! We hope to be gardening with the kids again in the next couple of weeks! Thanks to our community partners for making this project happen!

It may be hot, but fall is on its way! The time has come to start shifting our thoughts towards the cool weather crops - lots of leafy greens, root crops, and fall herbs will soon replace our flower and pea-filled beds. We recently headed out to the farm of Jean Mills and Carol Eichelberger to start our seeds for the fall. We're fortunate to have these wonderful ladies as our garden gurus! Not to mention an idyllic spot to spend a morning seeding flats. We may have gone a little overboard, but we figured the more plants the better - especially since we'll be planting at both the old University Place and the new interim location! Once the nights get a little cooler, we'll be able to transplant our seedlings into the ground.

It's July in Alabama, but the garden is faring quite well. The drought has forced us to be vigilant irrigators - we've spent many a hour moving sprinklers, laying drip tape, and brainstorming ways to make the process more efficient. Those recent afternoon thunderstorms have made us and our plants very happy. The zinnias and sunflowers are in full bloom, giving our parched and monochromatic landscape bursts of color.  The cockscomb are beginning to fan and some have assumed their curious, brain-like form. This month the peas have started to make their pods, and are the hotspot for all the local pollinators.  So far, it's just the purple hulls that have made their debut, but the crowders and black beans will soon follow. 

These photographs were taken in the evening light, just before a thunderstorm. 

Cockscomb fans

Zinnias!

The hyacinth beans have overrun their cages.

The garden looking towards the facade of the school. Most of the second story is gone.

After completing their work as pollinator attractors, the dill flower heads went to seed.

The rainbow bed is growing marigolds, blackbeans, chard, and sunflowers.  The chard seems to be unphased by the heat and is still putting out new growth!

A celosia brain!

Our hand-painted garden signs look great and add even more color to our beds!

You can always count on purple hull peas.

In the wake of the storm, we believe DCGP has an excellent opportunity to create an urban farm here in Tuscaloosa. As the city and its consultants discuss various ideas about rebuilding, we're putting our voice out there to advocate for food security, urban agriculture, and more support for school gardens. The city is using a really unique online townhall format to solicit ideas from the community in a quick and efficient manner. We posted our idea on the site today, and I hope you'll register and vote for our concept. I've spoken to city officials, the city planner, and the consulting firm about the idea of an urban farm and they seem very interested. What we need from those of you who support DCGP is to make your views known. The city needs to hear our voice as an advocate for urban farms, community garden space, and a more healthy and sustainable city for all.

In the early Spring I put together this short video showing students at University Place working in the garden. I think it represents the great educational opportunities of urban agriculture, and I hope you'll pass it along to your friends.