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.

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!

On the third Saturday of each month, Pie Ranch hosts a Community Work Day, potluck dinner, and rollicking barn dance in the roadside barn. All are welcome; come lend a hand in the fields while you work alongside other volunteers and farmers. Celebrate the spirit of community at this monthly ritual of working together on the ranch, sharing locally grown food, and then spinning, laughing and dosey-doing together into the night.

Come join us August 21st for our next work day and barn dance.

Schedule of Events

The work party starts at 2 pm.

Then join in the potluck at 6pm

and dancing at 7pm until about 10pm.

The dance is $7-20 (sliding scale) to compensate the band, ranch, and caller.
(Children under 12 free; workday participants pay a discounted rate of $5-15,
so come on down and hoe before you hoe down!)

Important info:

• Please leave dogs at home. (We love dogs too, honest, but it is really not a good event to have dogs present)
• Be careful turning into Pie Ranch.
• Park at the Roadside Barn or in the field directly behind the roadside barn. PLEASE DO NOT DRIVE UP TO THE UPPER SLICE.  If you’re confused, please ask at the roadside barn.
• Bring water bottles, clothing layers, sunscreen, closed toe shoes, and sunhats.
• Bring work gloves, tools, and enthusiasm! (We have gloves and tools for you to use too).
• Please bring your own dishes and utensils for the potluck. Every bit of clean up help is greatly appreciated!
• To keep an inclusive, family atmosphere, the potluck and barn dance are alcohol-free events.

“We don’t want a bigger piece of the pie, we want a different pie.” -Winona LaDuke

Pie Ranch Barn Dances are held every third Saturday of the month, all year long. Upcoming dances: September 18 and October 16.

Click here for directions to the Ranch. . .

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 >>

whole wheat apricot almond thumbprint cookies

ingredients:

½ cup butter

1/3 cup lightly packed brown sugar

½ teaspoon almond extract

1 cup Pie Ranch Sonora wheat flour

½ cup toasted almond meal or flour (toasted ground almonds)

Apricot jam

preparation

makes about two dozen cookies

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

2. Using a mixer, cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

3. Whisk together flour and almond meal then add to butter mixture and blend well.

4. Put cookie dough in refrigerator for 30 minutes.

5. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper; roll teaspoonfuls of dough into balls and place on baking sheet; make an indentation with your fingertip in the center of each ball.

6. Bake for 15 minutes or until the edges are just slightly brown.  Let cool on wire rack.

7. Fill cookies with raspberry jam.

summer saturday potato salad

ingredients:

8-10  medium russet potatoes (peeled and 1 inch cubed)

4-5  cloves garlic (chopped)

red onion (sliced)

¼  cup olive oil

¼ cup rosemary (chopped)

tablespoons salt

1 tablespoon black pepper

cup mayonnaise

cup basil

preparation

1.  Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

2.  Combine potatoes, garlic, onion, olive oil, rosemary, salt and pepper in a large bowl.

3.  Place potatoes on two baking sheets and cover with tin foil.

4. Bake, covered, for about 20 minutes, then remove foil and return to the oven.

5.  Bake for an additional 45 minutes to an hour, until potatoes are well roasted and brown.

6.  In a blender, combine mayonnaise with basil, place in refrigerator.

7.  Allow potatoes to cool for about thirty minutes, then combine with the mayonnaise mixture.

8.  Refrigerate, or eat at room temperature.

photo courtesy of Pinch My Salt

Apprentices visit Jacobs Farm
Pie Ranch apprentices along with other neighboring farmers and apprentices visited the Jacobs Farm “world headquarters” in Pescadero on June 22nd. The visit was an educational field trip and part of our CRAFT events happening this year with surrounding farms like Blue House Farm, Fifth Crow Farm, Double Dog Ranch, Free Wheelin’ Farm, Tunitas Creek Ranch, and many others.

Jacobs Farm is a large scale organic herb farm, with 8 sites along the coast from Watsonville to Pescadero, selling to grocery stores and chains nationwide. Emily Freed, assistant Production manager, and UCSC farm and garden graduate, gave us a tour of the Stage Road, Pescadero site, including hedgerows of 30 year old, 6 foot tall rosemary bush tunnels (fun to run through like a kid!), rows of sorrel, tarragon, basil and much more. The visit was an interesting look at a large scale organic farm that has grown from a small family owned farm started by a husband and wife 30 years ago, to one now servicing grocery stores and chains nationwide. Jacobs grows only herbs and edible flowers – no vegetables, no fruits. Their busiest time of year is November and December — Thanksgiving, believe it or not, is their busiest week — when the majority of Americans are interested in buying fresh herbs.

Apprentices and farmers were astounded by Emily’s production list of what was to be harvested that day, with numbers like: 960 pounds of tarragon, or 1,200 pounds of basil. Holy smokes! It’s hard to conceive of those kinds of numbers with solid vegetables, let alone leafy herbs.

Summer Interns
We’re really lucky to have a great group of interns on the farm this summer, assisting Pie Ranch staff with all variety of tasks, while learning about life on a nonprofit educational sustainable farm. Marissa, Natalie, and Kristen are doing a fantastic job helping with the animals and crops, as well as participating in our summer programs and we look forward to spending the rest of our summer together.

PODER
A group of 20 youth from PODER (People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights) came for a tour of Pie Ranch and baked pies with our strawberries, olallieberries, raspberries, and freshly-milled wheat.  PODER is a grassroots, environmental justice organization based in San Francisco’s Mission District with a mission to organize residents to work on local solutions to issues facing low income communities and communities of color. PODER believes that the solutions to community problems depend on the active participation of all people in decision-making processes and that improvements to their neighborhood must be made through collective social action to bring about social, economic and environmental justice.

Root Down at Pie Ranch
Megan Hanson, one of Pie Ranch’s skilled chef educators, usually with the Mission High “piesters,” brought a group of her Youth Leaders from the Root Down project in Los Angeles. They were in town on a retreat to learn about how other California cities provide food system options. After stopping by Food What?! in Santa Cruz, Megan and nine students came to Pie Ranch for a brief overnight on the farm and a hello to Adelaide and Dulce, the chickens, and goats. They picked strawberries, helped set up camp, and hiked up to the ridge for an awesome view of the ocean and beautiful sunset. They were so excited to be here, it was clearly a new experience for a lot of them, and a trip they felt very lucky to be a part of — it was one of the students first time out of the LA area. Thanks for visiting Pie Ranch, you’re welcome back any time.

On the third Saturday of each month, Pie Ranch hosts a Community Work Day, potluck dinner, and rollicking barn dance in the roadside barn. All are welcome; come lend a hand in the fields while you work alongside other volunteers and farmers. Celebrate the spirit of community at this monthly ritual of working together on the ranch, sharing locally grown food, and then spinning, laughing and dosey-doing together into the night.

Join us July 17th for our next work day and barn dance. We’ll be weeding & mulching our blueberry strip, harvesting Olallieberries for jam making, painting in the historic house, patroling the grounds for thistles and mulching the citrus trees.  Come join us!

Schedule of Events

The work party starts at 2 pm.

Then join in the potluck at 6pm

and dancing at 7pm until about 10pm.

The dance is $7-20 (sliding scale) to compensate the band, ranch, and caller.
(Children under 12 free; workday participants pay a discounted rate of $5-15,
so come on down and hoe before you hoe down!)

Important info:

• Please leave dogs at home.
• Be careful turning into Pie Ranch.
• Park at the Roadside Barn or in the field directly behind the roadside barn. PLEASE DO NOT DRIVE UP TO THE UPPER SLICE.
• Bring water bottles, clothing layers, sunscreen, closed toe shoes, and sunhats.
• Bring work gloves, tools, and enthusiasm! (We have gloves and tools for you to use too).
• Please bring your own dishes and utensils for the potluck. Every bit of clean up help is greatly appreciated!
• To keep an inclusive, family atmosphere, the potluck and barn dance are alcohol-free events.

“We don’t want a bigger piece of the pie, we want a different pie.” -Winona LaDuke

Pie Ranch Barn Dances are held every third Saturday of the month, all year long. Upcoming dances: August 21 and September 18.

Click here for directions to the Ranch. . .

Our thanks to Matt Corley for creating this video.   Come join us for our next barn dance, August 21st.

The Collective Roots Middle School Garden Class came for a tour of the ranch and a sampling of our strawberries. Collective Roots is a non-profit organization based in East Palo Alto that seeks to educate and engage youth and communities in food system change through sustainable programs that impact health, education, and the environment. One of the highlights of the tour was where students competed for a basket of strawberries by puzzling out a math problem posed by Jered:

One head of wheat produces 20 wheat berries (or seeds). Each seed, when planted, produces 10 heads of wheat. If you planted all 20 seeds from one head of your first year harvest, how many seeds would you end up with at the end of the next planting season?

All the students had a great time trying to figure it out and the lucky winners were Joanna and Pedro, who were able to deduce that the number of wheat seeds produced would be 4000! They were even generous enough to share their baskets with their classmates.

In addition to Collective Roots, we also had a visit from Summit Preparatory High School who came with Reikes Center staff for a tour of the ranch and a strawberry pick which they were going to use for their end of the school year pie bake. Their visit came at the end of a two-week wilderness experience to cap off their school year.

We hope you’ll enjoy some of the yummy treats we’re enjoying on the farm and at our partner schools these days. We’re using these recipes with our students, in our home kitchens, and with lots of great ingredients from our farm.

Zucchini Olive Oil Cake with Lemony Glaze

Ingredients for the cake:

1 cup (135g) almonds, pecans, pistachios or walnuts, toasted

1 cup (140g) all-purpose flour

1 cup (140g) Sonora wheat flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 tsp kosher or sea salt

2 tsps ground cinnamon

1 tsp ground ginger

1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

3 large eggs, room temperature

1 3/4 cups (350g) sugar

1 cup (250ml) extra-virgin olive oil

2 tsps vanilla extract

2 1/2 cups (300g) finely grated zucchini

Ingredients for the lemony glaze

1/4 cup (60ml) freshly-squeezed lemon juice

1/3 cup (65g) granulated sugar

1 cup (140g) powdered sugar, sifted

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 10-cup bundt or tube pan, dust with flour, then tap out the excess. You can also bake this in two loaf pans or muffin tins. You’ll just want to adjust the baking time for the smaller pans.

Pulse the nuts in a food processor until finely chopped. Set aside.

In a medium bowl, sift together the flours, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and spices. Set aside.

In the bowl of a stand mixer with the paddle attachment, beat together the eggs, sugar,d and olive oil for three minutes on medium speed until light and fluffy. Stop the mixer and scrape down the sides of the bowl, then add in the vanilla.

Add in the dry ingredients, making sure everything is mixed in well. Turn the mixer to medium and beat for 30 seconds. The batter will appear very thick at this point.

Stir in the chopped nuts and zucchini until just combined, then pour the batter into the prepared pan(s).

Bake the cake for 45 to 50 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean and the cake begins to pull away from the sides of the pan.

Five to ten minutes before the cake is finished, prepare the glaze by whisking together the lemon juice, granulated and powdered sugars until combined.

Let the cake cool for ten minutes, then carefully invert the cake onto a rack. Brush or spoon the glaze onto the cake while it is still warm, then let it cool completely.

Adpated from recipes by David Lebovitz and Gina DePalma

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ranch Dressing

Recipe from the Urban Sprouts Cookbook