Open Garden Day at the Edible Schoolyard

Happy Saturday!  The weather is absolutely lovely here in NOLA today, and what better way to spend it than getting dirty in the garden??  Doesn't shoveling compost, digging ditches, chopping/mushing rotting vegetables, and getting elbow deep in chicken manure sound oh so delightful?  I thought so.  And it was.

A little background:  The Edible Schoolyard is an organic gardening program implemented in 5 charter schools throughout New Orleans.  They teach the children (who are called Scholars instead of Students, by the way.  Love it!) all aspects of growing, harvesting, preparing and enjoying fresh organic produce.  There are herb gardens, edible plants (think tomatoes, bananas, artichokes, brussels sprouts, peppers, cucumbers, and more), ornamental plants, and even free-ranging chickens that produce eggs.

Once a month the school has an Open Garden Day where volunteers can come help out with all sorts of things that need to be done.  I started by shoveling and wheel barrow-ing compost to the newly planted rows:

Then I helped the little Scholars chop up the organic scraps to build a new compost pile.  Chopping up this mess means taking big buckets of discarded fruits and veggies mixed with sawdust and just pounding away with a shovel to break up the pieces and form a nice juicy mush.  Then the box below was filled in layers: fruit/veggie mush, then mulch, then chicken "sweepings", then sawdust, then rich soil.  After the layer of fruit/veggie mush was spread out, the kids got a'stompin' away to compact the whole mess:

Final product, now just 2 months to wait for the rich compost to be ready to feed the garden!

They also had a section that used vintage scrap and recycled material as planters.  That toilet is hilarious:

Bananas!  And some weird contraption in the bottom right hand corner that I could not figure out what it was.  They were like big cocoons but looked like loofahs wrapped in copper wire and strung up in the tree (any ideas?):

Weirdest/coolest chicken I have ever seen.  Named China:

 

The coop!  Yes, they have a chicken named Fat Tuesday (who laid a greenish-tinted egg, no less):

Dream keepers' garden with viney cucumbers growing all over:

I really loved this experience.  I love that the Scholars were so into it and knew waaay more about farming than I did.  They were all eager to work, especially if it got them dirty.  Go forth, little Scholars, and keep a'growin' and a'eatin' local, organic, healthy foods!