Fall BHSEC Electives and the Garden

The first meeting of the steering committee for the Bard Garden was held on August 9th. Parents from the Bard Garden Committee, BHSEC teachers and administrators, and our "edible schoolyard" consultants attended. Among other things we learned of exciting plans by several professors and teachers to use the garden as a base for lessons in biology, philosophy, health and food history and justice.

The next steering committee meeting will be held the week of September 18th. If you are a parent of a current or incoming BHSEC student we'd love to have you join us. We need new people and new ideas to help steer ongoing plans. If you are interested in attending this meeting leave a comment below and someone will get back to you with the exact time and location of the meeting.

Scroll down and continue reading this post to get a brief overview of our meeting on August 9th.

Attendees were BHSEC Principal Michael Lerner, Admissions Coordinator Quincy Robinson (both shown above) , Special Projects Manager Kristi Powell-Grenfell, parents of BHSEC alumna and Garden Committee members Sonia Laudi and Karen Hatch, Biology Professor Jennifer Cordi, and "edible schoolyard" consultants Tess Diamond and Cerise Mayo.

We discussed ideas, plans and concerns about the garden. Keeping the soil healthy and irrigation are things we will be attending to. In addition, the expansion of the planting beds will continue this fall and we are researching choices for a permanent sprinkler system.

Tess Diamond and Cerise Mayo, of The Agrarian Academy (which is a working title for their newly formed organization) spoke about their plans for incorporating the garden into the academics at BHSEC. Tess will be teaching a Health elective called "Food Politics and Systems" at BHSEC in the fall. The curriculum will include food history, food justice, botany, and nutrition and health.

Professor David Clark has plans to use the garden to teach a class centered around a philosopher who gave plants Latin names. Biology professor Jennifer Cordi has plans to have students test the DNA of local honey--hopefully from neighborhood rooftop hives--to find out which plants the bees actually visited to produce the honey (is clover honey really made from clover, for example).


It is important that BHSEC students take ownership of the garden and yard in order for it to be sustainable. Last year more students used the yard for relaxation and recreation than ever before. This year students will have more opportunities to work on garden projects and to make choices about what gets planted and how the yard is arranged. With the incorporation of the garden into the curriculum the garden is sure to be woven more tightly into the culture of BHSEC this year.

We have some grant money and some potential partnerships to make. Who knows where this will take us. Perhaps someday Bard will have it's own beehive and chickens too! (You never know!)

Again--if you are interested in helping out in the garden or joining the steering committee, it's a fun place to work and we welcome you. Have a look at the entirety of this blog to see how far the garden has come from it's beginning.

Food Systems and Politics Class Revitalizes the Garden

The East Village and Lower East Side have a rich history of community gardens. The gardens which still exist today had their start with the Green Guerillas a group started by neighborhood artists including Liz Christy, whose first appropriated garden still exists on the corner of Houston and Bowery, and by Puerto Rican immigrants, who brought a touch of their country/farming roots to the East Village--including chickens in some gardens. The Food Systems and Politics class is ready to contribute to that history at our garden on Mangin and East Houston.

Straw will protect the garlic and the strawberries from winter temperatures.

Class members have been learning about the history of our neighborhood gardens through readings and a recent walking tour. I visited the class one week after that walking tour (read about the tour here). The students are completely engaged, energized, and inspired to collaborate on their own Utopian vision for the Bard Garden.

A class member suggests hot pepper to keep wildlife from digging up plants and bulbs in the garden.

After going outside to see how the winter crops were faring in the cold weather, we read ¡Viva Loisaida Libre! by Bill Weinberg on his Utopian vision for the "Lower East Side Autonomous Zone" from the book Avant Gardening: Ecological Struggle In the City and The World edited by Weinberg and Peter Lamborn Wilson. The essay produced a few chuckles from statements like, "...the Lower East Side Autonomous Zone will impose such heavy taxes on Avenue A's yuppie eateries that NOBODY in our territory will know want!" However, many of the author's visions which likely seemed wacky to mainstream thinkers when it was written around 15 years ago--such as total recycling, local food production, and the replacement of automobiles with bicycles and human powered taxis--have become accepted and expected. Unfortunately the author's fears and reason for the manifesto have also become more accepted. The use of space in the Lower East Side has become more governed by developers' greed. Many (but not all!) of the scrappy working and creative class who used to populate the nabe have been outpriced and have moved away. I could feel dragged down with sadness by this but the thoughfulness and creativity of the students in this class make me feel hopeful for the future.


To further encourage students to imagine ways to recycle and revitalize a community, Tess shared an interesting website with the class called urbaninform.net. Unfortunately I can't find the exact video that she showed, but it was about an urban community which reclaimed an abandoned industrial space and used discarded wooden pallets found there to create gardens and mobile libraries.

As one young woman in the class observed, a garden is for a community to enjoy and use--and a garden needs a community to maintain it. In other words, if there is no community around a garden, there is no reason for it to exist to begin with and without the care and labor of the community it will die off. With this in mind Tess encouraged students to to come up with ideas and actions that might increase awareness of the garden and to engage and strengthen the BHSEC community.

The homework assignment was to come up with a 7 point Garden Manifesto. On Thursday the class will compare notes and create a class vision. To find out what they come up with be sure to check out their blog BHSEC Food: Experiences, Resources and Musings from the BHSEC Food Systems and Politics Class. Students are required to post on the blog as part of the work for the course. The Manifesto should be up in a week or two. In the meantime check out the photos from the community garden walking tour, information on saving seeds, and planting winter crops. I will also put a link to it on the sidebar of this blog.

Thanks to Tess and Kristi for inviting me and to the students for making me feel pretty darn good.
http://bhsecfood.blogspot.com/

Hurricane Irene

Walking around Stuyvesant Town yesterday after the Hurricane's eye passed I saw three honey locust trees that had been blown, or rained, down--roots and all. I decided to take a walk to see how the honey locusts in the yard were faring.

They are fine. So is everything else.


The only thing the wind knocked down was a potted evergreen tree (on the ground behind the willow in the white pot).

Tree down next door to BHSEC.

Garden Education and Weeds

In late June Kristi sent out this message:

There will be some activity in the garden this week: on Thursday, June 30 from 9a-noon, we are having a guest lecturer on flowers for the Summer Bridge program; and during July, Tess Diamond (our "edible schoolyard" consultant) will be working with the two other summer programs - the middle school Early College Academy and Summer Scholars (accepted 9th graders).

I decided to check out the guest lecturer, who turned out to be Louis Raymond, aka Louis the Plant Geek.
While I was there Louis spoke to three or four groups of about 20 students each.

He talked about composting, the various vegetable plants and flowers in the garden, and the birds and insects the plants attract, like hummingbirds. Hummingbirds love the pink bee balm pictured below. Their long beaks and the trumpet-shaped petals are a perfect combination.

He engaged the students with questions to draw out what they knew. Since I knew that the tree beds needed weeding, my ears perked up when he asked them "what is a weed?" because it was a question I had been asking myself.

Some weeds are obvious, like crab grass, lamb's quarter, plaintain, chickweed, and dandelion. Other plants in the tree beds looked like they might be weeds, but had flowers or buds that had the potential to be pretty--so what do you do? (That's a BHSEC year 2 student weeding with confidence in the picture above)

Louis's definition of a weed was, "whatever plant you don't want growing in your garden." There was agreement on Lenny Lopate's WNYC recent show Please Explain: Weeds. An expert from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden and a plant researcher from UC Davis said, "a weed is in the eye of the beholder."

The black eyed Susans in the picture above are "volunteers" and the tree bed is overloaded, so do I pull them? They are so pretty!

Enough about weeds. Here are some pictures of the organic edible garden in our new raised beds:

Overview of the edible garden

Strawberries--I assume they will bear fruit next June.

Chard [picture by Tim Murry]

Chard and nice organic soil

Lentil marker placed by the middle school students working with Tess Diamond our "edible schoolyard" consultant

Young tomatoes photographed on June 30th

The same tomatoes on July 11th [photo by Tim Murry]

Chives

Basil and parsely

Marigolds are a common companion plant in vegetable gardens. They have an anti-weed and insect repelling effect which is beneficial to the plants that grow near them.

Mesclun

Here's one last photo of some pretty pink flowers that Tim took when he went to check on the sprinkler system. Does anyone know what it's called? It kind of looks like a pink version of purple loosestrife (an invasive weed introduced from Europe) but it also looks like it could be a flower called Veronica. Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

The Yard in Use: 2011 BHSEC Neighborhood Festival

Here are some pictures of the yard during the BHSEC 2011 Neighborhood/Lower East Side Schools Music Festival which was held on Saturday, May 21st.

BHSEC Chorus & Stein Senior Center Chorus

LES Elementary school PS34 guitar ensemble

BHSEC Orchestra

BHSEC Special Projects Mgr., Kristi Powell-Grenfell; BHSEC Principal, Michael Lerner; State Senator Daniel Squadron; State Assembly Member, Brian Kavanagh; Baruch Tenants' Assoc. President, Mr. Roberto Napoleon, Baruch Tenants' Assoc. President; Rosemarie Diaz, Community Liaison for Daniel Squadron

Festival goers in the garden

BHSEC Rock band & trees/garden

Festival goers in the garden

The Yard on May 20, 2011

These pictures were taken out in the yard on Friday May 20th--the day before the Neighborhood Festival. There are two sets of pictures. One set of the new raised vegetable beds and one set of the trees.

THE RAISED VEGETABLE BEDS:

THE TREES: They are HUGE!