Notes from the Field Classroom

This week kicks off the first of four weeks of summer camps at Live Earth Farm!  We have added two new camps to our lineup this summer.  In addition to our two sessions of Art on the Farm Camp, we will be running a Young Farmers Camp and a Sprouts Camp! I am so excited to see what these four weeks have in store!

Today we finished the third day of Session 1 Art on the Farm Camp.  So far this week, we have gotten crafty making pickled carrots, garden signs, cookies, terrariums, bird feeders and many more projects!  We will be enjoying our pizza party and sleepover tomorrow night and more crafts and adventures on Friday!

There are still spots available in the next three sessions of camp, so if you are interested in signing your kids up, click here: http://liveearthfarm.net/discovery-program/programs/farm-camps/

As spring spreads it’s wings and embraces our beautiful valley I begin to realize how short this season really is on the farm.  The bursts of flowers on different fruit trees, the cycles of different bird calls, new growth on plants, and the momentous buzzing of bees turns the valley into a virtual soap opera of production.  As important as it is for students to see the fall season and its bountiful harvest from the farm, I feel like the spring season is almost more important for their deeper understanding of “where food comes from”.

From a biological standpoint the students get to learn the life cycle of the plant, how the six plant parts function, and the ways that we as humans use these parts.  They get to see the actual transition from a plant to a seed to a plant again. And taste all six plant parts.

 We have had twenty school groups to the farm this spring, (including our weekly and monthly visitors) and we have been having a lot of fun! The baby goats were born the first week of April, and have been a big hit! Our baby chicks arrived last week, just in time for the last couple of tours.  We have been enjoying our strawberry crop (though we just discovered that we have a mite issue in our Discovery Field) and are looking forward to our summer crops!

The morning of our 4th annual Sheep to Shawl dawned warm and sunny.  The lower barn and surrounding area was prepped for throngs of people hoping to glimpse the sheep shearing, make some cool crafts and eat some delicious food!

For the first time this year, we invited local artisan food vendors to the event. Companion Bakeshop, Penny Ice Creamery, and Storrs Winery set up in the field surrounding the sheep pen, intermingled with craft booths and vendors selling jewelry, wool, and clothing.

The sheep were sheared in the packing area with the spinning and weaving booths and  our farm stand featuring Garden Variety Cheeses.

Children swarmed the craft booths, washing, dying, felting, knitting, and carding the wool from the sheep being sheared across the way. Parents sipped wine, and observed the talented crafters, admiring farm themed bottle cap earrings and other goods for sale.

The aroma of chili and cornbread from Happy Girl Kitchen mixed with the intoxicating scent of strawberry cinnamon sparkling juice and lemon poppyseed ice cream from 3 of a Kind and Penny Ice Creamery.

The importance of community and art became apparent as new and old friends alike shared stories and laughs in the grass, as children ran through the fava bean fields with the dogs playing tag and as beautiful creations came out of the felting, and dyeing stations.

All in all, we had over 200 visitors and the Discovery Program made over $1500 dollars at the event to support our education programs for underserved members of our community! Thank you for all who participated!

Food What?! Partners with LEFDP

This spring Food What?! will run a pilot south county program at Live Earth Farm in Watsonville. This partnership between the Live Earth Farm Discovery Program and Life Lab’s FoodWhat Program will provide better access to the farm-based education and youth empowerment programs for under served youth in South County, an important goal of both organizations.

Watsonville, CA, March 19, 2013 – In early March, students from Pajaro Valley  Unified and Watsonville High Schools and The Success Academy will arrive by city bus at Live Earth Farm for their first day of farm-based youth empowerment and hands-on nutrition education as part of the FoodWhat Spring Internship Program.  In past seasons students from these schools have traveled to the FoodWhat Farm at Life Lab, located at UCSC.  Now the students will get to participate in the same successful program closer to home, in the education fields of the Live Earth Farm Discovery Program.  FoodWhat continues to serve mid and north county students at Life Lab the rest of the week.

This partnership will support LEFDP’s mission of helping local under served youth build confidence in learning to be active caretakers of themselves, their community and their environment.  In addition, the programs serve to further our mission in providing an arena for teens to participate in our programs.  The teens will practice hands on organic farming and cooking skills, learn to make nutritious meals from the food they cultivate, and develop ownership of the process of bringing food from seed to plate.

Welcome Peter Nelson; Our New Program Assistant

Peter is the newest member of our Discovery Program team. He has lived in the Monterey Bay area for the last 24 years. He has a history with many conservation and education nonprofits in the area and has had the opportunity to help create and build many school and community gardens around the Central Coast.

Most recently he was working in the Chinatown neighborhood in Salinas working with homeless and marginalized communities teaching job training, computer skills, and organic gardening. He has worked with people and plants in a variety of settings from the wilds of Ft. Ord to the Elementary School Gardens of Salinas, but this is his first time on a production scale farm. He is excited to meet and learn with all the amazing people that will visit Live Earth Farm and Discovery Garden.

“The first wealth is health” – Emerson

Winter Work
As Wavecrest’s winter rotation comes to a close, we are excited to announce that their winter project is almost complete! This Field Studies group decided to build a herb spiral on their school campus for their end of rotation project.

They used their communication skills and great teamwork to calculate the amount of bricks and soil needed for the spiral and chose the herbs and flowers for the garden based on water needs and medicinal characteristics.  I can’t wait to see what it will look like when all of the plants are in place!

As the other half of their project, the Field Studies students are teaching lessons on water conservation and medicinal herbs to the students in the lower elementary.

One of the days the students were working on their herb spiral, Jessica came by to teach them how to prune their fruit trees.  Current helped too!

We also had a very special group out to the farm in January–a college group from Williams College in Massachusetts!  Professor Hank Art brought seven students out to the farm for a week as part of their winter field quarter.  This was an amazing group full of passionate, energetic young people.  They helped us prune quince trees, cover the strawberry patch with plastic, aerate and weed the garden beds, trim goat hooves, and harvest and pack for the CSA boxes.  They made some amazing meals and we had some great conversations before they headed down to the EcoFarm conference where we met up again!

Winter with Wishing Well Preschool
On Saturday the 2nd I had the great pleasure of touring the farm with Wishing Well preschool. It was a grey morning on the farm and the theme of the visit was winter. This group of families are visiting us four times this school year, one for each season. Our simple plan is to share the same farm spaces with the children so they may experience the changes the seasons bring to our farm.

It was a pretty dry visit for winter, and many of the changes are very subtle.  So we taste, touch and smell our way around the farm hoping the children will absorb these subtleties into their very being. Some day when they have erosion as a vocabulary word in 6^th grade science, they will have an inherent sense of what erosion is and maybe even remember our swaled hill, where perennial trees and shrubs hold that soil in place, drink the water that is an asset rather than destroyer, and produce those Meyer lemons that smell so good and shine so yellow on a grey day in February.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to our Live Earth Farm Community! We are so lucky to have your support in making our farm and our programs exciting and accessible. We raised $2675 in our year-end campaign! These funds will make the year of upcoming farm adventures amazing and possible.

We are gearing up for the Ecological Farming Conference next week by hosting 8 students from Williams College leading up to their and our participation in the conference at Asilomar. They will be learning about agriculture and the food system by working in the fields at Live Earth Farm, as well as several other agricultural operations in California.

We are looking forward to tackling some tough topics with these higher thinkers: What are best practices in sustainable agriculture? What are the trade offs, concessions we have to make to keep the farm financially, socially, AND environmentally viable? What are we doing right? What can we improve on? Where do theory and practice intersect or diverge? We would love to hear your answers to these questions too. If we hear from you, we will share your thoughts in the next newsletter.

After the conference we hope to hire a Program Assistant to help with the Discovery Garden, our growing community of volunteers, office work, and farm tours. We are taking applications now, so feel free to spread the word.

In February we will the planning for the Spring Fund Drive and our 4th Annual Sheep to Shawl Event on Saturday March 23rd, rain or shine. We will be shearing sheep, scouring, dyeing, carding, spinning, weaving, knitting, crocheting, and felting wool. We will have fiber artists on site to share their craft and sell their wares. We will also have Storrs Winery pouring their wine and their vineyard-grazing sheep. We very much look forward to sharing the farm and some old time farm skills and fun at the Spring Equinox with you.

Last but really not least at all, we are opening our Summer Camp registration. This year we are offering 4 weeks of camp, 2 of our tried and true Art on the Farm Camp for 6 – 12 year olds, 1 week of Sprouts Camp for 3 – 6 year olds and their parents, and 1 week of Young Farmers Camp for 6 – 12 year olds.

• June 17 – 21    Art on the Farm Camp, Session 1
• June 24 – 28    Young Farmers Camp
• July 8 – 12       Sprouts Camp
• July 15 – 19     Art on the Farm Camp, Session 2

Register before April 15th to get the early bird price of $300 per camper.

10% Discount for CSA members, returning campers, siblings and coupon holders (only one discount may be applied per family).

Regular price of $350 per camper begins on April 16th, 2013

Happy New Year from the Live Earth Farm Discovery Program!

During one of the farm tours at the Solstice Celebration a boy, his mouth stained with blackberries, tugged on my arm to show me his harvest: a cupped hand filled with shiny black juicy berries. When I asked him if I could try one, he held out his hand out and said, “Farmer Tom, I wish I could stay and live here.” Hearing that, at that moment, felt so reassuring. It speaks to why we farm: to give people, especially children, a direct experience with the source of their food – i.e. that experience of being able to feel the soil with their own hands, harvest and taste the bounty of the land directly where it’s growing, and to learn how food can be beautiful, tasty, and nourishing. For the last four years, LEF’s Discovery Program has transformed the farm into a unique education and community resource, offering programs and events to over a thousand children every year so that they can experience this direct connection with the farm, engaging in the many nourishing food cycles unfolding throughout the seasons. With the start of the summer season, last week the Discovery Program hosted the first of several camps; the laughter and presence of children on the farm was a joyful distraction amidst our busy farm schedules.

Now I know you’re thinking, “this is great – how can I help see that this sort of on-farm education continues?” Well, one ‘delicious’ way to do so is to come to the Discovery Program’s Annual Fundraiser Dinner on September 22nd. We invite you to join us for this not-to-be-missed, in-the-field Culinary Extravaganza. Not only will it be an opportunity to experience the farm at it’s full-on-Summer-Bounty finest, but also the money raised will directly support programs that bring children to the farm; an unforgettable celebration for the senses that also benefits the Discovery Program’s education and community efforts. Hope you all can join us!