Garden Classroom Blog
Maple syrup season
2/7/24 - We seem to have found ourselves in a bit of a sticky situation, one that has required us to tap into our already sapped reserves and boil it all down to a sweet resolution. Of course I am talking about maple syrup season! At the time of writing this we have already collected 167 gallons of sap and made over 2 gallons of sweet, robust syrup!
By some strange confluence of events this year and last we found ourselves with sap that had around 3% sugar! More sugar means less boiling, which is certainly a relief when it takes about 4 hours to turn 5 gallons of sap into just 16 ounces of syrup!
Our mild winter allowed us to tap much earlier than usual on February 2nd, but also nipped us in the bud at the end. Warm days and nights meant bacteria growing in our sap, and since we just can't boil fast enough that signaled the end of our season. Good news for the trees that can now start healing from the holes we drilled!
We have already produced double the amount of syrup from last year so we have decided to hold a fundraiser where community members can support the Garden Program by buying our Mill Road Maple Syrup. More details to come, but for now our students can enjoy that very same syrup on some pancakes in class!
Teamwork makes the stream work
1/30/24 - Continuing with our theme of ecology from our last lesson, it's time to get the full picture. Hibernation was a great introduction to the concepts of cycles and resource scarcity, but only highlighted the competition between animals. In this lesson we explore the ideas of competition and cooperation within an ecosystem and how both are used in the ultimate quest for survival.
This game is a little bit different from the rest, it is one in which you cannot win, but certainly can lose. In a stream, or any ecosystem for that matter, the goal for each individual organism is survival, but individual survival is meaningless if the entire ecosystem collapses. It is thus advantageous for individuals to sometimes cooperate and sometimes compete for limited resources.
By cooperating, organisms like trees, deer, and fish can share information, food, water, and offer protection. An individual has a better chance of survival if they have a safety net. When resources get scarce, however, it may be beneficial to look out for yourself, even at the cost of your fellow fish being eaten. Even if you lose one fish, the predator, say a hawk, keeps the fish population in check, ensuring a sustainable food source for itself and the fish.
If there were not checks and balances in nature, then one organism might overwhelm the rest and disrupt the food chain/web. If fish overpopulate because there are no hawks to eat them, then the crawfish population is wiped out. With no food source, the fish ultimately die as well.
Students are treated to this careful ecological dance in our game, whereby they are seperated into three animal groups: Crawfish, Trout, and Osprey. The goal of the game is not just to survive, but to keep the whole ecosystem running. Each student has 30 seconds each round to plan with their species and 30 seconds to speak with any other organism. During which time they must decide which rock (1-7) they will visit at the end of the round to hide or to hunt. Crawfish and Trout do not want to be eaten by their predators and Trout and Osprey want a tasty meal. If a predator picks the same rock as its prey there is a chance they are eaten, but they are not out of the game! Just like energy is exchanged between organisms, in the game the eaten prey becomes a member of their predator's species, modeling reproduction and populations change!
Students will see as the rounds progress a shift in each species population, informing their decision to either cooperate to survive or compete to ensure the game continues. Alliances will be made and broken, lies and deceit will be rampant, and while there is no architect of the stream ecosystem, they will see it adapt and change in response to their individual and collective decisions!
Hibrrrrrrrrrrrrrnation
1/11/24 - It's not often that we get to talk about the things that we don't see, but that was exactly our focus this week. Every student got the chance to tell me what animals they have seen outside during winter. Answers ranged from birds and deer to squirrels and raccoons. Afterward we talked about what animals we haven't seen: mice, skunk, groundhogs, bats, and bear. Why? Where are they all hiding? Students were very quick to remind me about hibernation.
What does hibernation mean? Is it just a long sleep? Wouldn't they get hungry, I know I would after 3 months! Firstly these animals fatten up all year so they don't need to feed every day and they also have the special ability to control their heart rate. We felt our pulses and counted how many times our hearts beat. Now that we had a resting number, what happens to your heart rate when you exercise and when you sleep? Why do you feel hungry after running, but you don't need to wake up in the middle of the night to eat? Turns out hibernators can slow their heart rate so they use less energy too!
Now for the most important questions, the ones that will help them survive my game. How do animals know when to wake up from hibernation without a watch or alarm clock? Before long students caught on and informed me it was when the weather gets warmer and brighter during spring, of course! But what if you were a poor little mouse that woke up on a warm winter day thinking it was time, would you survive? Not if the predators, hunger, or cold had anything to say about it. Well, just sleep in then, no chance of freezing. Now you've just let everyone else get a head start on eating, leaving nothing for you!
Students were now transformed into mice, poof! They all scurried beneath my makeshift nest, hidden from the outside world and ready to hibernate. I, the fox, informed them that winter would be only 30 seconds long and they had to count to themselves before coming out. If they peeked out too soon, hungry for one of the hidden apples, they would be chomped! If they came out too late, all of the apples would be snatched up by braver mice.
We played this game with different length winters, sometimes 30 seconds, sometimes 40, sometimes 60! We also added and subtracted the amount of apples each round, leaving some mice hungry. Soon they began to realize that not every animal gets food, only those lucky or experienced enough to hibernate for the right length. And even mice who did wake up on time were beaten out by their companions! It was okay though, even if some mice didn't make it, they made a tasty meal for a fox or a hawk somewhere, so the cycle continues.
Tea Time Tournament
1/8/24 -In the weeks leading up to winter break it felt only right to prepare ourselves for the onset of frigid weather. And there is no better tool for surviving the cold than an aromatic cup of steaming tea! Since it is garden class, we used herbal teas collected in our garden and gardens nearby to treat our students to a feast for the senses.
It would have been boring to simply have a tea party, so instead, I devised a Tea Time Tournament that would allow each class the chance to make a brew unique to their class alone. 8 teas (lemongrass, lemon balm, citrus peel, mullein, white peony, marsh-mallow, blackberry, and passion flower) were pitted against one another in head-to-head blind smell tests. In each round they got only a second to sniff two mystery teas and decide on the spot which they liked better. The winners advanced to the semifinals, and when all was said and done we had the 4 winners from each heat. Each winner was added to the teapot and steeped to make a tea no other class got to try!
While the tea brewed we continued the tournament to decide our ultimate favorite tea. The reward for our tired noses was a delightful herbal tea mix that we all enjoyed together. Of course we learned the special tea tasting technique so that we could fully enjoy the subtle-teas of our drink.
If there was time at the end of the lesson, I laid one more challenge at their feet with a chance to win some take-home tea. The challenge was simple, after smelling all the teas and revealing which was which, I jumbled them around and saw if the class could correctly identify 3/5 of them. Very few noses were up to the task, but we had one lucky class take home the big prize!
Lesson 9 - The Game of Life (Cycles)
Posted by Douglas Keto on 3/22/2023 10:00:00 AM
In preparation for Spring, we finally got around to talking about plants. This is the Garden Program after all! And what better way to model the vagaries of nature and competition among plants than a life-sized board game!
But before we got rolling, or spinning in this case, we went over the basics. Why are plants important? Why do we have a Garden Program? Why should I care? Students immediately pointed out that lots of animals, including us, eat plants to survive. So I challenged them to think of anything we eat that, in one form or another, has nothing to do with plants. I got lots of answers like fish, pork, beef, cheese, and candy, but our livestock eats plants to produce meat and dairy and candy is made from plant sugars (corn, beet, sugar cane). Some more adamant students gave me tricky answers like water, but would we have any water without plants producing the O in H2O? And one particularly clever answer was fungi, but even fungi rely on plants or animals (living or dead) to derive their nutrients in some form.
So now we understood why plants are so important, we have civilization because of agriculture and the surplus of food it creates. And each plant goes through a life cycle, not every life cycle looks the same, but the general idea is similar. Grow, reproduce, repeat.
We then asked how plants can ensure their children have it better than they did, after all that's kinda the point! They can't uproot and move to water in a drought, and parent plants aren't always near their children, so how do they pass on vital information about the climate, soil, and pests? The answer comes back to the humble seed. Plants can pass on genetic information to the next generation so they can be more drought-, pest-, and rot-tolerant than their predecessors!
This is the idea behind seed saving. Those seeds will be better adapted to your garden than any seed you could buy off the market. And someday we hope to have a seed library for the community to contribute to and benefit from, a "take a seed, leave a seed" policy.
With all that being said, it was game time! Students got into groups and elected their first generation to start as a seed. They spun the wheel and moved a number of spaces around the life cycle according to what they landed on. But not all was hunky-dory in the garden. The Bean Bunch, Team Tomato, Garlic Group, and Squash Squad all had to contend with drought, pests, and other plants shading them out.
Landing on shine meant you could grow to the next life stage, and rain gave everyone a chance to progress in the game. Drought hindered your growth and sent you back to the previous life stage, while pest offered a chance to spin again if you answered a pesky trivia question right. And if you landed on a space with someone already on it, they were sent all the way back to the previous life stage, shaded out by the competition.
Each time a player made it a full cycle and landed on the seed space, they passed it off to the next player who represented the next generation, and so the game went and went until we were out of time. The team with the most generations completed at the end were the best adapted to the garden and the "winners" of our Game of Life (cycles)!
Lesson 8 - Mill Road Maple Madness
Posted by Douglas Keto on 3/22/2023 9:30:00 AM
Freezing nights and sunny days started Mill Road's maple craze! As soon as the conditions were right, we lept into action, tapping our beautiful sugar maples in front of the school. We measured each tree to determine how many taps it could take, drilled the holes, inserted the spiles (taps), and hung the buckets with covers. And before we knew it, the sap was flowing!
In fact, we were collecting sap faster than we could cook it down without the aid of a real wood-fired evaporator. But we made due and over the course of a month produced about 136 ounces of homemade syrup!
Students were given the full tour of our highly sophisticated sugaring operation, including learning how to identify, measure, and tap maples. Each class got the chance to taste the raw sap to see how little sugar (about 2.5% by my measurements) is actually in it. We learned the ideal place to tap the tree to get the most sap (south-facing side, above a big root, below a big limb) and even saw evidence of woodpeckers and sapsuckers!
But that wasn't even the most exciting part. Of course it's cool to learn about trees and the age-old process of tapping, but the real cream (syrup) on top was tasting. Our students were treated to a pancake party where they were able to try our Mill Road Maple Syrup (100% syrup) and compare it to the store-bought stuff (0% syrup). Most students agreed the real stuff was better (whew)!
Since this was our first season making maple syrup, we hope to improve our process going forward and would love to have a fundraiser for the Garden Program next year. Stay tuned for more maple madness and click the link below if you would like to learn more about the process for yourself!
Lesson 7 - Hero-sion or Zero-sion
Posted by Douglas Keto on 3/21/2023 9:45:00 AM
At this point you may be wondering to yourself, "how many water lessons could they possibly do?" Well, I could do them forever, but in the interest of variety this will be the last one...for now. And to combat any eroding attention spans, I decided to focus on erosion itself!
Building on the concept of dynamic equilibrium, each class was presented with a simplified view of a stream system. Headwaters high in the mountains flowing through hills, forests, fields, cities, and ending at an ocean or lake. From here, they were asked to envision the stream's characteristics at each point along its run, how fast or slow, shallow or deep, wide or narrow, straight or curvy, clear or murky?
Now with a qualitative understanding of the stream's change from start to finish, students were asked why this was the case. Why is the stream clear, shallow, narrow, fast, and straighter at the headwaters and murky, deep, wide, slow, and curvier at its outlet? How did all that sediment get into the water? Why do streams change their shape? Where does soil even come from?
All questions had the same answer, Erosion! But I wanted students to see for themselves, so each group was given a blank canvas of dirt in a tray. After a quick demonstration of my own river model, they set off to make their dream stream. No limits were imposed, they could make it any shape, size, or slope because at the end, each team came up front to demonstrate their design.
Every stream shape was represented and each team controlled how much "rain" fell on their stream for the demonstration. Students soon saw the erosive power of water in real time, witnessing how shape, slope, and rainfall intensity all contributed to erosion.
This is an easy experiment to repeat at home, needing only some soil, a tray or tub, and some water. You can repeat it endlessly with different variations of material, slope, rain, and shapes. And remember the old saying "Teamwork makes the stream work!"
Lesson 6 - Ecologenius Game
Posted by Douglas Keto on 3/21/2023 9:30:00 AM
We weren't done with water just yet, not by a long shot! Our discovery welled up from underground aquifers to the surface, feeding the life of our rivers and streams. We started locally with our own watershed, asking how many students knew the name of Red Hooks primary stream (the Sawkill)? The answer was surprisingly few!
But thankfully, science isn't solely about knowing the names of things. In ecology, the point is understanding the connections between all living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic) things in an environment, and here is where the students shined! They could name dozens of stream critters with ease, and of course knew that sand, silt, clay, and rock made up the banks and bed.
When pressed to make connections between the biotic and abiotic factors they had listed, students quickly made an overwhelming web, proving they knew more than they were letting on! But for our game we focused on crawfish, trout, osprey, and rocks.
Students were presented with a game that required deception, intrigue, alliances, and secrets. In short, it was a game of survival! Both predators and prey had to use their cunning to outwit their streammates. The objective was to choose a rock (1-7) to hide or hunt under and if your predator picked the same rock, you were eaten! If a predator had enough good meals, then the dead players were reincarnated as that predator. But if the predators went hungry, the crawfish were all too happy to snack on them to increase their numbers. Students made deals with predators, prey, and their fellow species to ensure their survival, and with no one right way to play, I saw a lot of good strategies.
In this way, players were constantly shifting through the ecosystem and food web, demonstrating the dynamic equilibrium of a stream. It was a blast to be a part of, but I would watch out, some of them are pretty convincing liars!
Lesson 5 - Aquifer Architects
Posted by Douglas Keto on 3/20/2023 3:30:00 PM
It was the end of the year before we could even say "groundwater recharge" and poof! It was January! The icy ground may have prevented us from digging a well, but it couldn't stop us from investigating the mysterious aquifers beneath our feet. We dove headlong into hydrogeology with our build-your-own-filter-fest!
Classes discovered that Red Hook gets its water from an aquifer and how all the tap water we drink had to gets there. Students were briefed about how rain and snow finds its way across farm fields, parking lots, and forests only to seep through the soil, refilling our aquifers and eventually our glasses. But with all that muck, grime, and pollution coming with it, how are we supposed to drink the water from our wells without getting sick? Well, for one thing, many students pointed out the filters that keep us safe, cleaning contaminants from the water so we can drink with peace of mind. But what about the water their poor Garden Teacher was drinking? There is no filter on my well!
That is where soil comes in, and where the fun begins. Soil's many horizons act as a natural filter for physical, chemical, and biological contaminants. It was then each team was challenged to build the most efficient aquifer possible to filter out the nastiest water they had ever seen. With only 6 'gold' to spend on a variety of materials (soil, gravel, sand, activated charcoal, and cotton balls) and each costing way too much to buy them all, the teams had to prioritize what they thought would work best.
And so they set off in their quest to clean my mucky water, and succeed they did! Each team, with varying degrees of success, saw that a few simple earth ingredients turned undrinkable brown sludge into (nearly) pristine water! And without fail, each and every class asked if they could drink it for a final test. And although I admired their scientific spirit, I had to advise against it!
Lesson 4 - Compostable Competition Continued
Posted by Douglas Keto on 2/24/2023 10:30:00 AM
It was at this point in the year the weather turned on us, gone were the days of breezy, balmy November nights and now dour December had begun. But that was no excuse to stop the composting fun! And what better way to build upon an obstacle relay race than with a reality TV-style Compost Cook-Off and skeeball sorting game!
In the immortal words of Sir Albert Howard, "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the compost." Well, maybe I made that up, but it makes a great tagline for our compost cooking show. Students (chefs) were divided into groups, given sophisticated cooking equipment (a large pot and spoon), and tasked with making the perfect compost stew for our compost-connoisseur worms to enjoy. They were provided with a variety of gourmet ingredients, both greens and browns. This included such delicacies as: fresh leaves, stems, grasses, roots, fall leaves, pine cones, bark, sticks, pine needles, seed chaff, and finished compost for seasoning. With limited time and maximum pressure, chefs had to carefully balance their greens and browns, add the proper amount of water, and mix thoroughly before judging. Of course, all teams made beautifully aromatic and (probably) delicious compost stew, making us all Michelin star chefs!
We then moved from the kitchen to the carnival, trading our pots and grills for games and thrills! Tables were set up in a skee ball style with buckets at their end labeled 'trash', 'compost', and 'recycling'. Each team had a trash bag full of labeled stress balls that had to be rolled, bounced, or thrown into their correct bucket to score points. This provided a perfect springboard to prepare future Green Team members to be able to sort trash from valuable compost.
Lesson 3 - Compost Relay
Posted by Douglas Keto on 2/23/2023 2:00:00 PM
Earth, Air, Water, and Fire all come together to produce the most magical substance in all of nature and the garden, Compost. Why throw away our food scraps and yard "waste" when they can be used to make free fertilizer! Greens and browns (earth) are mixed with water, turned to introduce air, and heated by the respiration of decomposing microorganisms (fire) to produce black gold.
Students were introduced to compost the only way I know how, a relay obstacle race! Teams of 4 were tasked with navigating my diabolical and challenging course through the garden all while collecting compost ingredients in their wheelbarrow. The first leg raced from the northern gate around the edge of the garden, taking a hard right to collect three large handfulls of browns (leaf mulch) before handing off the wheelbarrow beneath the trellis arch. The second leg wove through the twists and turns of the raised beds all the while grabbing their greens (kale and collard leaves) and handing off the cart to the next student. The third leg traversed through the bumpy "rocky road" covered in uneven paving stones, nearly toppling their hard-won ingredients before grabbing ice cold water from around the gazebo. The fourth leg was tasked with walking the wobbly wheelbarrow over the narrow, elevated path before racing out of the garden to dump and toss their cargo.
Students not only competed with their fellow classmates, but also with other classes as well. The fastest times for K-2 and 3-5 as individual groups and total class time were:
Fastest K-2 Individual Group Time:
Mrs. Rocco Team 3 - 1:51
Fastest K-2 Total Class Time:
Mrs. Dysard - 8:45
Fastest 3-5 Individual Group Time:
Mrs. Levine Team 3 - 1:41
Fastest 3-5 Total Class Time:
Mrs. Lloyd - 7:45
Lesson 2 - Expanding Our Soil Horizons
Posted by Douglas Keto on 2/23/2023 12:00:00 PM
As October slipped into November, we were gifted with warm weather, extending our outdoor season enough to delve into the soil. For as much as we talk about the care of plants, all too often is the type, quality, and provenance of our soil overlooked. We cannot control the geology or climate of our community, but we can better understand those factors to inform what we plant and how we care for them.
Students were divided into groups to investigate three central questions about soil: how can I identify soil, how soil impacts our plants, and how can we improve our soil. Using all of our senses (including taste, kind of), we discovered how to identify the grains in soil (sand, silt, clay) as well as acidity. Using these techniques, students were tasked with matching mysterious jars of soil to their corresponding buckets and origin (forest, garden, field, river). Armed with this knowledge, students then began digging in our garden, looking at the soil and determining its type and the creatures that lived within it, even finding some buried potatoes along the way! Finally, students were introduced to compost, a crucial component of natural and amended soil, measuring its temperature and learning about the organisms that call it home.
Additionally, students were instrumental in expanding the garden beds for next season as well as creating our gardens very first Hugelkultur bed!
Lesson Recap 1 - Gardening and Garlic
Posted by Douglas Keto on 2/23/2023 10:30:00 AM
Our first lessons started in late October, perfectly timed to start preparing the garden for the long winter to come. The first order of business was to weed some neglected beds, with students racing the uprooted greens to our compost pile. Next up was planting the nearly 430 cloves of garlic that were grown and harvested from our very own garden earlier in the year. Students used their spatial reasoning and math skills to carefully space the garlic 6" apart from any other garlic and 3"-5" deep. After the garlic was safely in the ground and the vampires kept at bay, we tucked our beds in for winter, covering them with a warm blanket of leaf mulch.
In addition to all the garden work done by students, Declan and I got to work removing the blighted grape vines, oriental bittersweet, and mugwort from our fenceline. In Spring, our new gardener, Celia Burg and I hope to plant some beautiful and functional vines on our fence to give our garden some privacy and pizzazz!
Fall 2022 Retrospective
Posted by Doug Keto on 2/22/2023 1:00:00 PM
Hello Mill Road Community!
There is no better time to awaken the long dormant Mill Road Garden Blog than now, as Spring will soon be sprung and the trees are brimming with sap! I am pleased to announce my incredibly belated arrival to the Mill Road Garden as the (not-so) new Garden Educator. My name is Mr. Keto (kay-toe), better known as Mr. Toe to Mill Road's students. So, without further ado, let's take a look at the lessons, activities, and programs that have kept us busy here for the past 5 months!
October - Putting the Garden to Bed
First things first, whether a grizzled gardener or greenhorn, every student was introduced to the Mill Road Garden as if it were new. All of its history, rules, quirks and each student's role as steward of this special place. Here we planted the first seeds, literally and figuratively. After some much needed weeding, pruning, and mulching, ~430 garlic cloves were planted (no vampires here) and the garden put to bed for winter.
November/December - Soil, Seeds, and Scraps
Now with our hands dirty, it was only right that we investigate the very soil beneath our feet and staining our clothes (sorry for the extra laundry). Students did a deep dive into the dirt, digging and expanding their (soil) horizons. On rainy days, we took to the science room to learn the art of seed saving, an environmentally and financially sustainable practice. Special thanks to Four Corners Community Farm for providing the plants! November ended with a smorgasbord of composting activities, everything from arcade-style compost skee ball, compost obstacle relay race, and the compost cook-off!
January/February - H2Whoah!
We started the new year off with a bang, or rather a splash with our New Year's Trvia-tastic-o-rama-thon, testing our gardening knowledge in a high-stakes trivia gameshow! Uncovering the mysteries of aquifers was next on the agenda, building our own filters using gravel, sand, and soil to demonstrate the power of aquifers and groundwater. Then we bubbled up to the surface to play an exciting ecology game of deception, intrigue, and betrayal! Students attempted to survive in their stream ecosytem as crawfish, trout, or osprey, hunting and being hunted in equal measure. Finally, we find ourselves at present day, building our own stream channels to investigate the enigmatic force of erosion and how it affects us for better and for worse.
The Future
I must apologize for this long overdue and very lengthy post, it was not my intention to wait this long, but doing these lessons has been keeping us busy! In addition to these brief updates, I will provide more in depth descriptions of the lessons taught so far, hopefully sparking some inspiration for more exploration at home and beyond! We have also re-instituted the Green Team program, collecting food waste from the kitchen and cafeteria to use in our school's very own compost system. The maples are tapped and maple syrup cooking is well under way for the next few week's worth of lessons and we are excited to share with you what will come next.
Thank you to the wonderful people at Mill Road, you have made the Garden Program a joy to run and grow. We have big plans for Spring so stay tuned!
Best,
Doug
dketo@rhcsd.org