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/

Garden Planning Meeting 2/8/2011

It was a week ago yesterday that members of the BHSEC Garden Committee joined BHSEC Special Events Manager Kristi Powell at the school for a meeting to brainstorm about possible future projects and improvements to the Bard Yard. In December a benefactor gave BHSEC a generous donation to be used in the development of a cafe garden a la Alice Waters' Edible Garden project. Waters is the renowned chef and the most visible activist and promoter of organic and locally grown food--especially at schools. We are very excited about this and had a very productive meeting.

The garden committee was joined by architect Andrew E. Burdick of Ennead Architects who has volunteered to work with us.

He came prepared with several versions of plans and quickly sketched out new possibilities after listening everyone's ideas and noting the elements that should be included in the plan (basketball courts and space for outdoor performances or the high school graduation after-party, for example)

Here's the gist of what we discussed at the meeting (from Sonia's notes):

• a permanent and largely underground water solution
• incorporating vegetables into the garden especially those which thrive in spring and the fall to coincide with students' attendance
• the location of, design, and construction materials for the "farm"
• the design of the entire space to incorporate the "farm," the common meeting/events area, the buffer area, and the basketball court
  
• how to get the faculty and students (and community in the future ) more involved. Examples: holding classes in the garden, doing botany or science projects, Eco club, recycling, events, art installations, and arranging garden elements to encourage "hanging out"
  
• long and short term goals
• future sources of aid, funds or grants and partnerships with other local groups to combine grants
  
• the possibility of getting help, especially in the summer when students are gone, from partners and local community groups
• how to make the garden more appealing--the aesthetics, design, noise and wind buffers, seating areas, and using the new kind of astroturf

The progress we've made in the garden since the committee got going in 2009 is amazing. Being in the city we may never have the amount of green area that Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson does, but our yard is going to continue to improve and be a great place to think.

Garden Plans Moving Forward Fast

I arrived at the garden on Friday at about 2:15pm and found the soil around most of the plants to be pretty darn moist. The curly willow tree that had seemed to be dead or dying on my last visit had about 10 new green leaves on every branch (crisis averted!). Since I was there I watered anyway--but because the plants didn't need as much water as usual I was finished in the record time of 1 and 1/2 hours. It normally takes 3 hours to water the plants.


I was happy to notice that the playground on the west side of the yard had been completely removed. There was a yellow caution ribbon stretched across that side of the yard and two men were filling up the holes in the pavement where the swing sets and jungle gyms had been anchored. I wanted to say, "hey wait, we want to get rid of the asphalt and put in plants", but I guess with holes all over the place the "slip and fall" lawyers might end up having a field day.

Another development is that committee member, and professional landscaper, Susan Welti drew up some gorgeous plans for the New York Restoration Project to follow when they plant the 33 trees which should be happening in the next two months. At last Wednesday's meeting, when the plans were presented, members also discussed drip irrigation systems, the care that the new trees will need (a lot of water for one thing), and the information that Helen will need for the Lowe's grant application she's writing--for an irrigation system.

In addition Rebecca met with the architect in charge of the Bard building expansion to make sure the garden plans did not conflict, and Tim contacted Liz Poreba, the advisor of the BHSEC ECO Club. We now have two student liaisons to help us plan future garden activities and care.

All in all an amazing amount of forward movement has occurred since last spring. The garden was beautiful this summer, and it will go on. I can't wait to see what it looks like next year.

I'll end this post with pictures of the squirrels eating lunch in the yard, the place where the playground used to be, and some early autumn beauty from our asphalt jungle.