The Year in Review

It's been a busy year for the garden...

After finishing the expansion of the garden in the spring (adding 5 beds and 8 apple trees), we had 10 volunteers who helped us get our second successful harvest! Carrots, radishes, chives, apples, kale, strawberries, and lettuce were among the edibles.

At clubs day, we got over 40 newcomers who signed up for the club. We used that help almost immediately, filling a bed with new kale seedlings and Swiss chard, and those plants continue to grow today!

We gave a very successful presentation to the Prince of Wales PAC, and received the full amount we were asking for! We used some of this money to purchase a new composter, which we put to work right away.

With that said, we still have a lot to complete in the new year.

1. The FoodCorps Grant

We are in the midst of working out an application for the FoodCorps grant from Whole Foods. If we get the grant, we'll be able to use the funds towards lots of exciting new projects.

2. The sign!

We need to get our sign up to let people know what's going on in that little field beside the school! This'll be one of our first projects of the year.

3. Benches!

We will hopefully have some benches by the tree in the new year! Here's a simple design that we're thinking of going for: http://www.gardengatemagazine.com/main/pdf/bench30.pdf

4. Drip irrigation

We are planning to have a drip irrigation system up and running for the apple trees some time in late spring. Stay tuned for details!

5. Conferences? Workshops? Others?

We're certainly open to new ideas!

See you in the new year!

Harvesting + Recipes

On Thursday, the club came out to the garden to harvest the kale we planted last Spring. It was great to harvest some of our produce (there are recipes for kale listed at the bottom of this post).

...and here is our new composter from Metro Vancouver! We used the money we received from the PAC to purchase it, and it's already taken up all of the excess yard trimmings and food scraps we couldn't fit in our first one. Thank you, PAC!

Lentil Soup with Kale

Ingredients

*Note: these are flexible - you can mix and match as you like

1 cup dried lentils [brown or green], rinsed

1 Tbsp quinoa (if available)

1 medium yellow onion, diced

2 carrots, diced

1 rib celery, diced

1 garlic clove, minced

2-1/2 cups low-sodium chicken broth

3 cups water

5 cups torn kale leaves—discard thick center stems

1 tomato, diced

salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Directions

1. Rinse lentils and quinoa under cool running water. Place in a large pot.
2. Add chicken broth and water.
3. Add onion, carrots, celery and garlic to pot.
4. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer uncovered for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Cook until lentils are tender.
5. Stir in kale and tomato. The kale will quickly wilt and reduce in volume, so don’t panic. Cook until kale is tender.
6. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Sautéed Kale With Garlic

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 pounds young kale, stems and leaves coarsely chopped
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic finely sliced
• 1/2 cup vegetable stock or water
• Salt and pepper
• 2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

Directions

1. Heat olive oil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat.
2. Add the garlic and cook until soft, but not colored.
3. Raise heat to high, add the stock and kale and toss to combine. Cover and cook for 5 minutes.
4. Remove cover and continue to cook, stirring until all the liquid has evaporated.
5. Season with salt and pepper to taste and add vinegar.

Kale Chips

Ingredients

1 bunch of kale, washed and stems removed

2 tbsp apple cider vinegar or lime juice

1-2 tablespoon olive oil

sea salt or seasoning blend to taste

Directions

1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Chop or tear kale into pieces.
3. Mix oil, salt and vinegar (or lime juice) in a bowl, mix well with kale and massage into kale pieces.
4. Spread onto baking sheet.
5. Bake for 10 minutes or until crispy. Take kale out immediately if it changes colour to brown.

Updates!

Hi everyone!

So it's been a very busy month for us volunteers, both at school and in the garden! First and foremost, we have purchased a new composter from Metro Vancouver, photos of which should be up shortly. This will help reduce the stress we have on our current composter.

Secondly, the Garden Club will be attending Climate Change Conference 2011 (C3) at Windermere! This is a great opportunity to participate in some form of action and to build networks of sustainable education with other students. Visit http://c3vancity.wordpress.com/ for more information.

Finally, we will be harvesting the remainder of our kale at the next meeting, so be sure to come with a bag, and be prepared for the weather!

PAC Recap

Our presentation to the PAC (in case you couldn't guess from the title of this post) went extremely well! Thanks to all the members (and Ms. Chung) who came to help out! No word yet on whether or not our application was approved, but the parents were really enthusiastic about the garden, so hopefully we'll be starting on some of our bigger projects very soon!

Here's a basket of veggies and fruits from the garden that we brought to the meeting

Going over our presentation

Old concept drawings of the garden (I'll post about these in more detail)

A few carrots. Or a metaphor for togetherness. Nice one, Danielle.

Last-minute prep

Mission accomplished! Unfortunately, No photos of the presentation, but it went really well.

October 24th PAC Meeting

We have a spot to present at the Oct. 24th PAC meeting! We will give a ten minute presentation to the PAC and hopefully make a good impression by having as many Garden Club members there as possible, so mark it in your calendars :) This Thursday's meeting will center around getting ready for the presentation and we will have more details about meeting time etc. so please try and be there.

Kale, Chard, and Canada Geese

We had another very productive meeting today at the garden. A dedicated group of gardeners showed up to help us plant some kale (brought in by Ms. Chung) and some Swiss chard (brought in by Danielle) that will grow over the winter. We also got a chance to use our compost, which has been over two years in the making, and it is as healthy as ever. We're keeping the newer kale plants covered for now so they have a chance to grow undisturbed while they adjust to their new home.

Hopefully the newly transplanted kale will grow as abundantly as our existing plants, seen below. Here we are harvesting some kale that was planted last season. Some tips for eating include:

-Boil and serve with oil and vinegar

-Stir-fry and serve with other dishes

-Eat raw

Kale also tends to get sweeter after the first frost.

A bit of a post script here, but at the end of our meeting, we saw huge flocks of migrating Canada geese:

That's it for now. Stay tuned for more!

Work Party Reminder: October 14th 2011

Reminder to all that we are having a work party tomorrow after school (Friday October 14th) to plant some of the beds and prepare the garden for upcoming cold weather. We will meet in the garden at around 3:20 p.m. Hope to see everyone there!

Starting Off the Year

The start of another school year, and we are off to a great start! After everyone settled into the routine at school, we held our first few meetings of the year. We had over 40 newcomers this year, so it looks like we'll have plenty of helping hands!

We had a very productive meeting today, with around 20 people showing up to help out with aerating, staking, and weeding. We'll be preparing the beds for the winter later on this month, filling them with soil and planting seedlings. We're hoping to have some new winter crops within the next few weeks, so stay tuned!

End of Summer Update

Whew, what a summer! Thanks to a bit of wet weather and a collection of incredible volunteers who came to the school on their vacation and watered, the PW Community Garden has had a wonderful summer harvest. We had abundant crops of lettuce, kale, carrots, strawberries and radishes. Our little orchard produced lots of apples, and while most are still too small to eat, I had the privilege of enjoying a delicious gala apple picked right off the tree! As we prepare for yet another year of school, the PW Garden Club is looking forward to another great year of plants and gardening. Our fearless club leaders of last year, Khorshid and Emma, have both moved on into post-secondary education (good luck guys!), and have passed leadership of the club to myself (Danielle) and Jordan. We are looking forward to helping our garden and community grow!

Sign & new beds

After much planning for a long time, we finally got around to the two main projects that we had set goal to achieve in the beginning of this year: making a sign for the garden for people in the neighbourhood to be able to identify it, and building wooden beds for the extra piles of soil.
On Wednesday, May 11, the Garden Committee came to school (on a Professional Day) for about 5 hours and worked in the rain to get these projects done. Danielle Mayo, who has been taking the initiative for building the new beds, led the group in building the beds out of the wood that we got donated to us by Windsor Plywood and also Danielle herself. Danielle has been responsible for the planning and execution of this project and she truly deserves quite a lot of credit. The team that helped her in the building of the beds and installing them in the garden was: Jordan Chiu, Frederic Ho, Nick Sakich, Sheida Naderi-Azad, Camille Roberge, Jack Mills, Jack Hall, Isaac Beckie, Owen Iyer-Grant and Paige Muir.
At the same time, Emma Gosselin, Michelle Chan and I painted the sign for the garden.

(Click on the images for a better look)

A look back at what we've done

I have been doing an internship at an architectural firm for the past week, and in a conversation that my mentor and I were having about LEED, he proposed that I present the sustainability action of our school to the office at a staff meeting. This is the presentation I gave which includes the recent environmental activities done by different student-run organizations/groups at our school. I have included the Environment Club, Community Garden, Plan-It Earth, Student Sustainability Committee and Prime Earth. Ofcourse, I am not highly involved in all of these initiatives so I explained the ones that I have been less involved in while mentioning the names of the people behind those projects.
The community garden is the second initiative mentioned in this presentation, and I have included the timeline of the development of the garden with pictures that weren't posted online before. The audience that I presented this to was very impressed with our progress and some even asked me for more information on school gardens because they knew people who wanted to start one of their own. So it's important to be vocal about what we've done and get the word out. This is how we're going to get everyone involved in the sustainability movement.

I'd like to give a big thank-you to Ms. Susan Chung, Daichi Ishikawa and Hobson Lin for helping me gather some of the information I needed to make this presentation.

Take a look and be proud of how much we have accomplished since May 2009 as a team. Cheers!

Prince of Wales Secondary School Sustainability Movement on Prezi