Diggin' In With FoodCorps Fin - April 30th 2021
Happy (almost) MAY! I can hardly believe it!
With just 5 weeks left of classes, I’m already starting to miss the groups of kids I get to work with every week. But I can’t stay sad for long when there’s so much exciting stuff happening! Here’s what we got up to this week:
Yes! Hands in the dirt! These brave gardeners helped me plant Chickpeas alongside the potatoes they planted last week. Chickpeas (Garbanzo beans) and potatoes are companion plants, as the Chickpeas are a legume-- a nitrogen fixing plant that the potatoes enjoy very much.
This week we also planted Purple Dragon carrots and Walla Walla sweet onion sets. Yippee!
While the garden is still very much dirt outside, inside things are blooming! Among them is the Rosie basil which took so long to grow large compared to the other herbs and greens in the Tower Gardens. It has a beautiful purple color. The other Sweet basil had HUGE leaves! Look at those things!
I blended these up in a food processor with just a few other ingredients to make a deliciously fresh pesto: Garlic, pine nuts, parmesan cheese, olive oil and salt. Walnuts or breadcrumbs can be used in place of pine nuts if you don’t have any. It was great on some penne pasta with mushrooms. YUM.
In other news, I had some more brave volunteers in my 2nd grade classes this week who offered to become plants. Their classmates used what they knew about the six plant parts to transform them. Well done!
3rd graders this week got to be authors. They wrote “The Life and Times of a Nutrient”. These were stories told from the perspective of a nutrient on its journey through the nutrient cycle-- from the environment into living things and back again. I was not surprised at their creativity, but I was at their modesty when it came to waste... They had so many other nice ways to say poop! This student was fairly blunt, but he definitely got the point!
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading, and enjoy the sun!
Finley