This month has been humming along with a variety of young people visiting the farm including:

Standing Tree Nature School, a Santa Cruz-based program that connects youth to nature came for an overnight program this month. Leaders, Tod Haddow & Whitney Cohen, brought fourteen 9-12 year-olds to the farm where they toured Pie Ranch and learned about the intersection of wild & cultivated nature. Everyone had fun playing with the baby goats, chasing chickens, collecting eggs, tasting strawberries and harvesting produce for their dinner.

Out of Site, a nonprofit that invigorates the educational climate in San Francisco public high schools by expanding and nurturing visual arts, architecture, and performing arts education, brought a group of youth for an overnight visit to the ranch. They spent two full days farming, creating art, eating good food and exploring the surrounding area.  The students baked pies with strawberries, olallieberries, rhubarb, and freshly-milled wheat flour from the farm, harvested produce for their dinner, and collected eggs while engaging in a variety of art projects.

The Geneva Car Barn is a building in San Francisco submitted for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places and a site that now provides job training for underserved youth (ages 14-19) in areas such as the culinary, digital, literary, media, and technical arts. A group of eleven youth from the inaugural culinary arts program came for a full program day at Pie Ranch. They toured the farm, baked strawberry rhubarb pies, and prepared a nutritious lunch with ingredients they harvested that day. They were full of enthusiasm and smiles — thanks all!

Friends of the Urban Forest brought fifteen youth from San Francisco to the farm for a tour and farm activities. They planted our next round of Early Girl dry-farmed tomatoes and helped with a number of farm chores. Thanks, Friends!

We’re eagerly anticipating the start of the school year programming and bringing back students from Mission High, John O’Connell, Oceana, Urban, and many more wonderful youth.

It’s all about the education here at Pie Ranch, and while we have been spending a lot of time talking about the terrific partnerships we have with Mission and John O’Connell High Schools in San Francisco, and the budding relationships with Pescadero schools, our apprentice and intern programs offer an immersive, hands-on experience for those who are seeking to expand their knowledge base around sustainable farming practices.

Each Tuesday, apprentices and interns at Pie Ranch take a 1 1/2 hour walk through the farm with our co-founders and lead farmers, Nancy and Jered, for an in-depth look at the soil, row crops, orchards, irrigation infrastructure and watering schedules, pest & disease patterns, pastures, and animals during which time we make our to-do list for the week. The apprentices and interns have been assigned different crops to research and will be reporting on their respective crops at our upcoming field walks to enhance their understanding of crop culture, history, and cultivation. During the past couple months, the apprentices and interns have also had evening classes on soil fertility, tillage, and Community Supported Agriculture — with emphasis on the Teikei movement in Japan.

Yesterday morning, Nancy led a summer pruning class in the apple orchard with apprentices & interns. Summer pruning cuts are made into wood during the growing season, which remove photosynthetic surface (leaves) and stored reserves. Thus, summer pruning dwarfs and deinvigorates more than winter pruning. We summer prune to control tree height, shorten lateral branches to create strong supports for holding fruit, open up tree to sunlight and air circulation, form & direct growth, and develop fruit wood quickly and precisely.

In addition to these weekly farm walks and workshops, our apprentices and interns are also a part of the central coast CRAFT program (Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training). Last month, they toured Potrero Nuevo Farm, just south of Half Moon Bay. Potrero Nuevo  is a 300-acre farm and wilderness property where food production, classes and educational programs take place. It’s also got the cutest red bike hut in the world with its very own Facebook page!

But it’s not simply about learning the art of growing food sustainably. For our apprentices and interns, learning what to do with the fabulous produce we grow is another critical element. In addition to managing our weekend farm stand, where we sell what’s been freshly picked on the farm, they also take part in developing our own line of Pie Ranch products. Currently the line-up includes pan pie mix and a variety of jams, but we hope to begin adding more items as the season continues. To help apprentices and interns learn more about the art of food preservation, our Director of Operations, Pei-Yee Woo, led a workshop where they created jam from Pie Ranch produce. The end results: olallieberry, strawberry, strawberry olallieberry, and strawberry rhubarb, can all be found at the farm stand now!

San Francisco Green Drinks is a volunteer-run, nonprofit organization that actively promotes green networking, education and volunteer events in the Bay Area. Their annual fundraising event Green Generations will benefit Pie Ranch and two other local nonprofits also focusing on environmental education.

So, come on out and join us on Tuesday, August 3, 2010 at 111 Minna to have a great time and connect with other individuals who care about making the world a better place for future generations.  Minimum suggested donation upon entry is $15.

Visit their website at www.sfgreendrinks.org for more information.

PUENTE to PIE

This month has been a-buzz with preschoolers, kindergarteners, and 1st graders singing in Spanish, planting crops, harvesting produce and preparing nutritious breakfasts & lunches — all a part of a program called “Puente to Pie” – a 3-week summer program for Pescadero Elementary students based at Pie Ranch. Our collaborator, Puente, is an organization based in Pescadero that bridges the community in various ways, providing access to safety net services, health and wellness services, leadership development, and community engagement and action. Puente also works with farms, ranches, and nurseries to promote a sustainable agricultural economy on the South Coast.

In partnership with Puente, we  decided to pilot this program with the intention that the La Honda/Pescadero School District could adopt this model for the future, as a response to Pescadero Elementary being labeled as one of the poorest performing schools in California based on their STAR test results. The elementary school is comprised of predominantly Latino students for whom speak Spanish is a first language. As the tests are in English, low results are inevitable. Research has shown that when students learn concepts in their first language, they are more likely to learn those concepts in a 2nd language. Additionally, there has been research that shows that project-based learning has a number of benefits and also can improve test scores. See http://www.ecoliteracy.org/essays/school-garden-debate-weep-or-reap.

When the school was faced with choosing from the Obama administration’s four options for low-performing schools, a group of concerned parents got together to discuss the Charter & Transformational Models. Everyone agreed that the Transformational Model would be the best way to meet the needs of the students & teachers. Instead of a longer school day as the model proposes, the parent group was pushing for a longer school year with Spanish immersion & project-based learning opportunities woven in. “Puente to Pie” was the perfect way to pilot such a program. Additionally, Pie Ranch has been wanting to bridge with the Pescadero community, especially the Latino and farm worker communities – so this was really a win-win situation (feed two birds with one worm).

Experienced teachers, Norka Bayley and Jennifer Eckert along with chef-educator Dinorah Gudino have been leading the group each day M-F from 8:30-3pm. Puente youth interns from Pescadero High School: Jose, Laura, Omar, Mariela, and Pati, work side by side the younger kids – most know each other from the community and some are even family. Pie Ranch apprentice, Eliza Hale and Pie Ranch intern/UCSC Community Studies student, Natalie Stameroff, have been leading the students in harvesting ingredients for their lunches each day. In addition, Eliza & Natalie headed up three circular planting projects for the students – a pizza bed; a pole bean tipi; and a sunflower house. The students will be able to come back in the fall to see their beautiful creations.

Of the 18 total students, half are native Spanish speakers, and half native English speakers. Each day the students sing songs in Spanish, do art projects, engage in farm activities, and harvest and cook healthy meals together while learning many traditional subjects (math, literacy, science) in a unique and beautiful outdoor setting. Lessons have emphasized subject material learned in the previous year, as well as new concepts for the coming school year. All instruction has been in Spanish with cultural appreciation and natural history woven into the curriculum. Some of the special activities have included collecting seeds, journaling, painting gourds, etc. A gourd mobile will be on display at this year’s Pescadero Art & Fun Festival.

To give you a sense of the program, Pescadero teacher Jennifer tells about some of the activities they did:

“In the first week, the students read In the Tall Tall Grass and explored different life forms that live in the grass: snakes, hummingbirds, ants, bats, caterpillars, beetles, etc. The children will act this song/story out for the parents at the end of the program. When they walk by grass the children sing in chorus ‘en el pasto alto alto!!!’ They are also making masks for this story.

“The book for last week was called A Sembrar Sopa de Verduras and depicts the planting of seeds, caring of seedlings and plants, harvesting of vegetables,  preparation and eating of vegetable soup. In morning circle the children “made” vegetable soup by putting into a giant pot (all of thisreally happened with a pot and real veggies) peppers, onions, carrots, potatoes, broccoli, squash and zucchini.

“Out in the free play zone there are shovels, rakes, hoes, garden gloves,small hand tools, watering cans, pots, seeds and buckets full of water. The children have been digging trenches, working together, getting really really muddy, planting seeds, making mud pies and decorating them with sticks, flowers and rocks…They also help clean up all of the tools at the end of these activities.

“We have been feeding the chickens the extra lettuce and scraps after making salad each day, as well as collecting their eggs.”

Two of Jennifer’s very favorite activities so far:

“We took a walk one day with colored paint chips, three adults had a basket full of different colored paint chips. We would hand each child a chip then ask them if they could find that color, or one like it, on the farm. What happened after that was so amazing! The children were comparing the chips to the color of different chickens, to the tractor, to different colored leaves, on plants and dried on the ground, to grasses, to the sky, to a strip of blue on the hose on the ground, to the water spouts, to flowers!!! This activity really enabled them to look closely at the farm around them…

“The other activity, that we have regularly been doing, is garden journals…my favorite time was last week when we went on a walk to the upper slice, just to wander. We sat in a field of dandelions, after having looked at poison oak (it’s in the same family as mangoes and pistachios), giant mushrooms growing on a tree and the seed heads of dandelion flowers…We sat down in the middle of this beautiful yellow field, took out garden journals, and the children drew whatever they wanted. The idea is that they draw what is around them as well as what they have been learning. Sure enough, each child drew flowers, grass, the sun, and we (Norka, Pati and I) wrote the words that the children were saying in their journals.

“Each day we sing many songs in Spanish, eat three times together, have two circle times, play soccer, read books and rest quietly, run, walk, and the children are always eager to help us to everything!!”

Biggest successes? Watching Alejandro & Lucas have a spinach eating contest in the field; hearing “El Tambor” being sung from afar; Dinorah’s tortillas made from scratch with Pie Ranch Hopi Blue Corn; each child having the opportunity to harvest berries then bake pies; bridging the Latino & Anglo communities, celebrating the Spanish language and our connection to the earth.

Check out what the Mercury News has to say about the program >>