“Diggin’ In” with FoodCorps Fin : February 5, 2021
It’s February!
And with the new month, Spring is beginning to feel a lot closer. While it may still seem far off with snow showers here and there, garden planning has truly begun in earnest. Our raised beds which were installed in the Outdoor Sensory Classroom this Fall will be filled with dirt as soon as next month, and seedlings will be started indoors before being transplanted as soon as the last frost is gone. Then we’ll hit the ground running for the growing season!
Some plants that our students have suggested we grow are:
Pumpkins
Peppermint
Pole beans
(They won’t all be P’s, I promise)
Grapes
Garlic
Cauliflower
Chard
Nasturtiums
Tomatillos
The Outdoor Sensory Classroom will be a space for everyone to grow and learn together, so if there’s a plant that is special to you and your family that you would like to see grown, we want to do that! Let me know by emailing Finley at finley.tevlin@foodcorps.org. If you have seeds for any of these plants, or want to get involved, please reach out!
We’re very excited to grow these food crops right here at our school to learn from by caring for them, using them in lessons, and even cooking and sharing them. As all gardeners know, or anyone who watched nature through the seasons, it’s powerful and rewarding to care for something from its birth to maturity. And even better when we can eat what was grown right in our backyard!
Third grade this week learned more about this in our lesson this week on “food miles,” or the distance that food travels to get to us. In a story book called How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World by Marjorie Priceman, we read about a young girl who travels across the world to get the ingredients for her apple pie. While it wasn’t very realistic to travel such distances just to make a pie, it’s true that those ingredients do come from those places around the globe, but most of the time, those things are brought to stores for us.
To get a better idea of just how far those foods traveled, we made a human line graph of our apple pie using yarn and the whole class: 1 foot of yarn equaled 100 miles in distance. The shortest string was 29 feet long (sugar from Jamaica) but the longest was 89 feet long (cinnamon from Sri Lanka). Then, we considered which of these ingredients we could get from Oregon: butter, eggs, wheat and apples! Using the same scale, we could see how far butter from Ontario, wheat from Pendleton, eggs from Cove, and apples from La Grande would travel by comparison: about the length from our elbow to our fingertips, down to just the length of our fingernails! By buying local, we can save all that energy and effort it takes to move that food, and support our community by paying farmers and ranchers.
After weeks of requests, our 4th grade chefs in Cougar Cooks prepared their own pizzas! And they did so using whole wheat flour. With the help of Jamie Cox from OSU EXt. SNAP Education team, students learned the importance of grains for giving us energy, and why we should include whole grains as at least half of our grains to get their maximum benefits.
We did the whole pizza in just over a half hour. The recipe is No-Yeast Pizza, if you would like to try it.
If your student is in 4th grade and wants to join, look out for an email and an announcement on your Class dojo for details. RSVP to Finley at finley.tevlin@foodcorps.org and join us at 5pm next Wednesday to cook some tasty stuff!
That’s all for now, take care all!
Finley