Author Archives: growingfoodandsustainability

SoS Middleton: Making Art and Winning Awards

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Thank you to everyone who made Growing Food and Sustainability’s first year a success! Please take a look below to see all that Summer of Solutions-Middleton accomplished.

Program Mission:
We started GFS to engage youth in hands-on environmental education through food production, cooking, art, biking, and multi-age relationship building. We ran a summer garden camp, organized community workdays, piloted a bike-powered compost service, and delivered produce donations to those in need.

Accomplishments:

  • 27 students ages 4-17 involved in the summer garden camp
  • 108 hours of garden summer camp taught within 9 weeks
  • 1,260 pounds of produce grown and harvested
  • 1,220 pounds diverted from the waste stream through our bike-powered compost pick-up service
  • 730 pounds of produce donated to the Middleton Outreach Ministry Food Pantry
  • 229 pounds of produce donated to the Middleton Senior Center

Since our Garden Summer Camp finished-up in August, we have been working with the Ecology Clubs at Middleton High School and the Clark Street Community School to keep students involved in garden and sustainability education. These groups helped us prepare the garden and youth farm for the winter, learned how to construct a light table to grow plants indoors year-round, and participated in conversation about our food system.

CSCS Continue reading →

Coming Together Over Food

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Cross-posted from Growing Food and Sustainability

GFS kicked off this fall with two bountiful, joyful events!  On October 15th we worked with the MHS Ecology Club to put on the 8th annual Organic Dinner.  It was really exciting because this was the first year the meal included produce that was grown in the school gardens.  As has become tradition, The Roman Candle Pizzeria catered the main course, which was a pasta dish containing our veggies, Clasen’s, a local bakery, provided bread sticks, and the Chocolate Shoppe donated ice cream.

In order to have enough fresh veggies in the middle of October, a few weeks ahead of time we harvested a bunch of kale, onions, peppers, and eggplant and blanched and froze them so we could have fresh veggies, in the pasta dish.  We also harvested kale the day of the event for a fresh kale salad.  Between the dinner and the silent auction, the event raised $1,400 which will be split between the Ecology Club, the school’s Envirothon team, our program Growing Food and Sustainability, and the Friends of Pheasant Branch, the stewards of our local nature preserve.

It was a really great experience to work with both of the high school Ecology Clubs on the Organic Dinner.  There was a lot of fun to be had harvesting the veggies and I think the experience of creating a delicious, sustainable meal to serve to their teachers, friends and family was really rewarding.

MHS Ecology Club students preparing kale and eggplant

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Meet Middleton’s Fall Interns!

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Cross-posted from Growing Food and Sustainability

Even though the summer is over, here at Summer of Solutions-Middleton we are continuing to involve students in our garden project. We are working with the Ecology Clubs at both Middleton High School and the Clark Street Community School, providing students with projects to fulfill their service-learning hours, and outreaching to teachers to help them to see our gardens as teaching spaces. Much of this has been possible because of the help of our two fall interns, Caila and Sara.

Caila Fredrick

Hey! I’m Caila Fredrick, a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. First and foremost, you should know that I love to eat. You could say this motivates most of what I do, from packing my backpack with 10% books and 90% snacks, to hopping on board with Gabrielle and Natalie as they bring high school students out of the desk chair and into a classroom filled with dirt, plants, worms, and good old-fashioned working with your hands.

My love for being outside and Mama Earth began when I was a brace-faced ten year old canoeing through the Northwoods of Wisconsin with Camp Manito-wish YMCA. I’ve been goofing around in the woods ever since, and now I strive to bring that love of nature into my kitchen…and into my belly. I believe in knowing where your food comes from, and in making it taste good. More importantly, I believe in sharing this passion, something I get to do with Growing Food and Sustainability. I especially look forward to bringing the philosophies of experiential education, which have been so powerful for me through work at Camp Manito-wish and through Adventure Learning Programs in Madison, into my time with the high school students in Middleton. Continue reading →

Celebrating a Bounty of Food, Friends, and Fun

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Cross-posted from Growing Food and Sustainability

Yesterday was our biggest event of the summer, our Harvest Festival! We invited friends, family, neighbors, and community members to join us in a celebration of Growing Food and Sustainability’s first summer. Much has happened since Natalie and I first dreamed-up this program last October. A few highlights include…

  • Creating a 5,000 square foot Youth Farm where we have harvested 923 pounds of produce to date
  • Running a 9-week summer program for 26 students from 4-16 years old
  • Donating (and delivering with our bike trailer) 373 pounds of produce to the Middleton Outreach Ministry Food Pantry and 145 pounds to the Middleton Senior Center
  • Composting 887 pounds of food waste from Bloom Bake Shop and Roman Candle Pizzeria
  • Building a team of youth leaders to run our program. Ain and Lauren, our full-time participants, we simply couldn’t have done any of this without you! And to all of our committed part-time participants (Abby, Alyson, Asha, Colin, Katie, Lennea, Liz, Matthew, Morgan, Neil, and Teague), you kept our program rolling and contributed your talents and energy exactly when we needed them!

And now about that Harvest Festival…

Our wonderful volunteers made sure that everything ran smoothly and that everyone had fun! There were games, activities, music, and food for all to enjoy!

Farm Stand and Bake Sale at the Harvest Festival

Lauren putting our bike trailer to another use…

Bike-powered Hay Rides!

Our long-time friend and artist, Cathi, came all of the way from Chicago to run a ceramic plate-making activity! It was a hug hit with kids and adults of all ages.

Making ceramic plates!

Some of the kids took charge over the activities. Here, 6-year-old Elizabeth is running the face painting table.

Family face-painting

Seeing the faces of so many friends (old and new) at the Harvest Festival made me feel so supported in this work. Grandparents, parents, and family friends who have watched me and Natalie grow-up were there to cheer us on. I also realized how many new connections GFS has made within the community and how many new people I can now call friends. It felt incredible to know that the GFS team created this beautiful community in just one summer, and that these friendships and connections will continue to grow into the future.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to making our Harvest Festival such a success. We had so much fun celebrating with you and your generosity helped us to raise over $500 to send a group of our youth leaders to the Summer of Solutions National Gathering in Connecticut next week. THANK YOU!

~ Gabrielle, Program Leader

You can’t beet this! (A beet-filled week at GFS)

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Cross-posted from Growing Food and Sustainability

We had a new crop of young ones in our program last week and it was a blast! We painted signs in preparation for our Harvest Festival and harvested 24 pounds of beets!

4-year-old Finn, with a beet as big as his head!

Along with the excitement of new program students, we also had to say goodbye to the triplets: Ancha, Rama, and Modu. We are lucky to have had this family as a part of our program for our first summer. Their high energy and enthusiasm never wavered, whether they were harvesting and eating raw kale leaves, painting signs to decorate the garden, or engrossed in a Magic School Bus book.

Their mom, Viki, told us that she feels that they will apply all that they’ve learned through the program in school, at home, and in life. It is a wonderful feeling for all of us to have formed such a strong relationship with a family that will continue to be involved and support us in coming years.

With all the beautiful, ruby-colored beets laying around, I was inspired to paint portraits of the triplets using beet juice as a natural dye.

Ancha enjoying her kale. The beet juice is still wet and bright pink.

Rama taking in the garden. The beet paint is half dry.

Modu showing off his cherry tomato. The paint is dry and golden brown.

We sure will miss the laughter, shouts, and energy they brought to the program, and we’re already looking forward to seeing them again next summer.

Of course, I can’t end this blog post without a reminder for our Harvest Festival, this Saturday the 11th in Fireman’s Park from 4-7pm. I looked at the forecast and it is supposed to be sunny all day with a high temperature of 82 degrees. Should be fantastic! Come and join us for carnival games, live music, and purchase fresh produce, kale pesto, and baked goods at our market stand.

Hope to see you then!

Natalie

The Buzz in Middleton

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Cross-posted from Growing Food and Sustainability

This week Growing Food and Sustainability was fortunate enough to have Heather Swan give a talk on beekeeping during one of our training sessions. Heather informed us about behaviors and beekeeping practices as well as bee’s importance in agriculture as pollinators. She also gave insightful anecdotes about her own personal experience working with bees. When she was done we sampled some honey, such as the light and highly prized tupelo honey to the rich and molasses-like buckwheat honey.

Heather taught us many fun facts about honey bees:

-A healthy colony may contain as many as 60,000 worker bees.
-2,000,000 flowers must be visited to create a pound of honey.
-During the winter, bees will form a cluster in the center of the hive and vibrate to create heat. The center of the cluster may reach up to 81 degrees Fahrenheit.
-The military has used bees to locate explosives and illegal drugs because they have an extremely sensitive sense of smell.
-When bees are “swarming” in search of a new hive, they are in their least aggressive state.

Back in the garden:

We harvested our first cabbages and radishes. Plenty of rain and few weeds meant slightly less work in the garden itself. We have also been making kale pesto and screen printing T-shirts in preparation for our Harvest Festival on Saturday, August 11th.

A personal note:

I will be leaving Middleton this weekend and as such will not be continuing to work with GFS this summer. It was a pleasure to meet all of the hardworking participants with whom I grew, delivered, preserved, ate, composted and appreciated vegetables. This summer I got closer to my food, literally, thanks to GFS.

Sustain your Growing,

-Matthew

You Never Miss the Water Till the Well Runs Dry

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The unbelievably dry conditions in Wisconsin the past couple of months have been rough on everyone, and Growing Food and Sustainability was no exception. Everyone working in our gardens has put so much effort into quenching our plants’ constant thirst. Even so, our poor crops looked persistently parched. This past week, however, we’ve been thrilled and grateful to receive SO MUCH RAIN!

Our older youth program participants were with us when we felt the first drops one afternoon. It was only five or ten minutes worth, and hardly heavy, but it seemed to lift everyone’s spirits. Our participants and program kids danced in the rain and couldn’t stop smiling.


It made us realize that, rain (or simply natural balance) has a real influence on every person, agriculturally linked or not. Since then, Middleton has had two deep rains (and some awesome thunderstorms to boot). It seems to have revived both our plants and our participants.

The garden looking nice and refreshed post-rain

It is hard to believe that the program is already halfway over, but we have done so many great things and have SO many still to look forward to:

• We have been planning for our end of summer Harvest Festival on
Saturday, August 11th. It will be really fun for everyone and an amazing way to share what we’ve been doing this summer with the community.

• We have a training next week on how to grow mushrooms and hopefully we can learn to grow some on the coffee grounds we pick up from Bloom Bake Shop each week! The training THIS week is on how to can vegetables so that we can sell them at the Harvest Festival to save up for….

• THE GRAND ASPIRATIONS NATIONAL GATHERING! As of this week, we are pretty sure that both Ain and Lauren (our two full-time participants) will be able to join Gabrielle and Natalie (program leaders) and Colin (part-time participant) at the national gathering in Hartford, CT at the end of August! YAY.

Other Exciting Garden News:

• Our youth program has painted beautiful signs to go outside of our youth farm and outdoor classroom space. We will be putting them up this week!


• This week was our heaviest harvest yet! (111 lbs) The beautiful potatoes, beets, onions, radishes, and eggplants really added something extra awesome to our harvest day and we can’t wait to bike the produce to the Middleton Outreach Ministry as a donation tomorrow morning!

• Since the mowing down of the crops by hungry creatures, we have replanted most of the garden’s open spaces and are hoping to have some new beans, carrots, beats, and radishes soon! We spread milorganite in hopes that we can keep those hungry creatures from coming back for seconds.

• We transplanted the melon, cucumber, and squash sprouts into our garden this week just before the heavy rains. They seem to be doing swimmingly!

All-in-all things are going well around GFS this week and we expect they will only get better as rain starts to fall and big program plans start to unfold!!

– Lauren

Old Friends and New Connections

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This week at Growing Food and Sustainability was a blast!

The week started out with an enjoyable Downtown Middleton Farmers’ Market. There were more people than the previous week, due to the more moderate and pleasant weather. This was great because our stand had many new children and families stopping by to participate in our kids’ activity. This week the topic was waste disposal. They had to match up different types of household waste, like plastic baggies or apple cores, with composting, recycling, garbage, or hazardous waste. The kids really enjoyed it, and some of the parents learned something new too!

Farmers’ Market Kids’ Activity Table

The Farmers’ Market was also especially fun this week because there was a new produce stand! This new stand, called “The First Acre”, is run by a couple mutual friends of Growing Food and Sustainability, who are fresh out of college. It was great to see old friends at the market, as well as to see some fresh and young faces. Overall, it was my favorite Farmers’ Market of the year! Now our mission is to make more consumers aware of the market to help support these hard-working farmers.

The First Acre Farm Stand

The other part of the week that really stood out to me was an activity that we did with our middle and high school aged participants on Wednesday. We used chalk to trace out the energy system, starting with the sun. It was especially illustrative because the youth participants could literally see the closed loops with systems like composting, and the literal dead ends with the fossil fuel system. The discussion surrounding this activity was quite deep, though a bit heavy, and it seemed as though all the participants were engaged and learned something.

Energy mapping with chalk

This activity had an unexpected result for me. I really enjoy making flow diagrams like this (which I knew already), but I learned that they are an extremely good way to convey information to others, and they’re great discussion starters. I also learned that I enjoy teaching about systems very much. These are both things that I think I will find useful in my future, since I plan to become a high school teacher.

Overall this week was excellent, and I look forward to the upcoming weeks of Farmers’ Markets and lessons. I also enjoyed the unexpected benefit of learning something new about myself from the activity!

Thanks,
Colin

Our Bumpy Days at GFS

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Last week was the third week for the GFS (Growing Food and Sustainability) summer program in Middleton. It has been more challenging for all out participants as compared to the previous weeks. Check out what has happened and our reactions:

  • We had a super warm week with temperatures ranging from around 90-104 degrees Fahrenheit (on Thursday the heat index was 120). All of the plants were so desperate for natural watering and it was unpleasant for us to work outside under such extreme weather. (It might be worth mentioning that we were so excited that it rained on Tuesday, but it only lasted for a couple of minutes). As our response to this situation and parents’ concern about it, we decided to have more indoor activities with our students so that everybody could maintain their health and excitement throughout the program.
  • Our bean plants in the front bed were ‘trimmed’. We assumed that deer might have done it. One of our Program Leaders, Gabrielle, asserted that the deer might have run out of food from their natural habitat due to the long drought (oh poor animals…and our plants too!)

Bean Plants Eaten by Deer

  • A number of other bean plants were severely damaged by Japanese beetles. We saw a lot of them all over the Youth Farm and ended up spending about half an hour catching them. We throw them into soapy water to kill them. We decided that we will have a bug-catching session every day to control their population and to prevent our plants from being damaged further.

Japanese Beetles!

  • Some kind of animal ate our planted seeds which were surrounded by a cage made of 1/4 inch hardware cloth in the greenhouse. It was our second attempt of planting squashes and melons. Gabrielle was determined to have the third try by reseeding and putting the tray inside the closed hallway. The next day, we were disappointed to discover that our seeds were eaten again! (what a smart kind of pests we have here). We decided to have the fourth try and put the tray inside the classroom. This might be our last try since we are running out of seeds (keep fingers crossed).
  • Despite the fact that we were having a national public holiday on the 4th of July, we had our program as usual. That morning, Lauren, one of our full-time participants, quickly realized as soon as she woke up that there was no bus going to Middleton from Madison throughout the day due to the holiday (Our full-time participants, Lauren and myself, depend on the Madison Metro bus service to get to Middleton form downtown Madison every day for the program). We soon came up with the solution: Lauren and Ain took a different bus to get halfway to our program venue and Natalie fetched them from there by car. Problem solved and the program ran just like any normal day!

Along with all the challenges that we have faced throughout the week, there are also a few exciting updates for everyone to cheer up for:

– We had a new kid in our Tuesday/Thursday group who attended our program for the first time last Tuesday. Her name is Elizabeth. She is six years old and a smart friend of the triplets. Thanks to Virginia, the triplet’s mom, for bringing more people into the program!

Lauren and Elizabeth

– We built worm bin with the Wednesday/Friday group with instructions by Gabrielle. We are going to use the worm bin this summer to do vermaculture composting (an indoor composting method which uses worm as decomposer).

– We are having adorable baby eggplants at the Youth Farm. We might start harvesting eggplants pretty soon!

– The sunflower seeds that were planted by the Wednesday/Friday group are already sprouting at the front part of the Middleton High School garden.

– Our compost is now feeling warm after we added beer mash last week (lots of nitrogen!)

– We recovered the strawberry and raspberry plants from being dried out by the extreme heat after we watered them generously throughout last week. Now they look green again!

– We harvested onions, peppers, radishes, beets, and tomatoes for the first time. We might be getting more of them soon!

– Ain

Cross-posted from http://growingfoodandsustainability.wordpress.com/

Bonding Over Bugs

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“The highlight of my week, which may sound a bit morbid, was killing bugs.”

It was the second week of our summer program, and it was awesome! Between tending the garden and youth farm, running our camp for elementary through high school age kids, cooking, learning to grant-write and canvass, Katie’s skill-share on making your own cleaning supplies, biking our produce to MOM (Middleton Outreach Ministry Food Pantry), and our community work-day, it was a busy but fun-filled week.

We spent Thursday cleaning up the front of the high school garden. Before we set to working on it, it was overgrown with weeds and looking pretty miserable. We did some major weeding, and designed an awesome new area where we planted lupine and three varieties of sunflowers (that will grow 2 ft, 7 ft, and 12 ft tall!). It was a crazy hot day, but our hard work totally paid off. Along with the awesome red PVC pipe planters we hung up last week for the herbs, the garden area is looking beautiful these days.

The High School Garden Being Transformed

The highlight of my week, which may sound a bit morbid, was killing bugs. Japanese beetles have basically been attacking the youth farm. Their favorite plants to munch on seem to be the potatoes and beans, but they have proven themselves to not be picky-eaters. We have found them on the tomatoes, kale, broccoli, and more. On Friday, we decided something had to be done. We grabbed a bucket of soapy water and the helping hands of the kids in our program, and set out to capture those critters. It was quite a sight – about ten of us, running/sneaking around the farm to hunt down the evil beetles, and throw them in the bucket. We were all on a mission together to save the youth farm from the ensuing invaders.  In the midst of all the craziness, it was a great bonding moment for us and our high school participants. At our weekly meeting later that day, it came up as a highlight in a number of people’s weeks.

Unlucky Japanese Beetles

Another highlight for me was our Saturday community work day. Every Saturday we have a community potluck from 12PM – 1PM and a community work day from 1PM – 4PM. Thus far we have not had much time get the word out, so it has mainly just been program participants. Recently I have been telling my friends all about the awesome stuff we’re doing here at Growing Food & Sustainability, and have been encouraging them to come out on Saturdays to see what I’m talking about. I was super excited when seven of my friends showed up to volunteer this weekend. We got to work right away, weeding what we call “the triangle”—basically a triangular patch on the youth farm which had never been weeded. The job seemed overwhelming at first, but with our manpower we were able to clear out the triangle in no time, and even begin transplanting our squash!  We even had time left to weed the rest of the farm, water everything, and go on a Japanese beetle killing spree. It was great having so many of my friends out to support our program. In future weeks as we continue to spread the word about our community work days, I hope we will have many more people join us out on the youth farm.

Weeding “The Triangle”

Overall, it was a very productive week. It was encouraging to see our garden and farm transformed by all the weeding, planting, and bug-killing we did, but also to see friendships strengthen and grow as a result of working alongside one another for the sake of sustainability. Bring on week 3!

– Lennea

Cross-posted from http://growingfoodandsustainability.wordpress.com