CitySprouts 4th Annual Harvest Festival is October 2

Please come explore the joys of children's gardening, good food, and autumn in New England at our annual Harvest Festival. Enjoy a delicious lunch or snack and have fun with your children. Admission is FREE.

It all happens Saturday, October 2 (rain or shine), 10am to 3pm, at the Peabody School, 70 Rindge Ave., Cambridge.

Our theme this year is Stone Soup, after the famous folk tale which teaches that a community will always eat heartily when it comes together to share good food (and a special recipe!) We'll be making our own Stone Soup at the festival with veggies from our school garden.

We'll have lots of other hands-on activities for children too, including decorating pumpkins, pressing cider, and creating vegetable prints. Plus, the kids can try their hands at decorating carrot cupcakes, or making apple pops, tacos, or calzones.

Our musical entertainment will be provided by two local sensations: Connect 3 and the Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band. There will be music, dance, a children's parade at 1:00 pm, and stories to please all ages.

And the food! There'll be delicious lunches and snacks for sale, with mouth-watering dishes from Whole Foods Market, Casablanca, Henrietta's Table, Rialto, Veggie Planet, B-Side, Green St. Grill, Oleana, and other renowned Cambridge restaurants.

Our Festival this year is sponsored by Whole Foods Market and Growing Healthy. All proceeds benefit CitySprouts.

CitySprouts site

On Wednesday, September 22, CitySprouts will receive 5% of all receipts from the Whole Foods Markets at all three Cambridge stores. Please shop at the Alewife, Prospect Street, or River Street store on that day, and support CitySprouts.

Many thanks to Whole Foods Markets for once again granting CitySprouts a 5% Day, always a successful fund-raiser for our organization.

Click here for Whole Foods Market

Summer round-up
All four of our CitySprouts' school gardens grew with gusto this summer. In the Peabody, King Open and Haggerty gardens more than 100 children from the Community School summer camps gardened with CitySprouts--exploring the compost for critters, harvesting seeds, watering herbs, making art projects, planting bush beans, or tasting a yummy salad straight from of the garden.

What did we grow? Lettuce, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, corn, pumpkins, gourds, zucchini and other summer squashes, watermelon, tomatillos, beans, cucumbers, peas, strawberries, blueberries, carrots potatoes, kale, peanuts, okra and lots of flowers and herbs.

A special thanks to Summerbridge volunteers, who came to the Haggerty garden twice to weed and help plant flower gardens, and to the many parent volunteers at all the gardens who watered and weeded each week.

Coming this fall
We look forward to a bountiful harvest in our gardens this fall, and our annual Harvest Festival to celebrate all of our school gardens. CitySprouts garden coordinators are ready to assist classroom teachers with integrating garden-based learning into their students' studies: science units in 2nd, 3rd, 5th and 7th grades; history and social studies units for colonial American, Native American, ancient Chinese, Greek, African, and Medieval European cultures; and health and good nutrition.

This fall Erin O'Neill will join the CitySprouts staff as the garden coordinator for the King Open School. Amy Baron will return to the Peabody, Gretchen Friesinger to the Morse and Laurie Gaines to the Haggerty.

Families are invited to come see their school gardens, meet the garden coordinator and learn more about the CitySprouts garden program at their school. Check our website each season for school garden updates, with pictures.

The garden in winter
Our lunch clubs, informal small groups of 5th to 8th graders, continue through the winter. Students cook, compost, and work on indoor garden spaces. In February, CitySprouts staff begin ordering seeds and garden supplies for the new growing season.

The Cambridge Public Schools are grateful for the work that CitySprouts has done to support our curriculum through school gardening. Our teachers have benefited from the professional development that CitySprouts has provided, and our students, of course, have found the gardens to be wonderful learning environments. Thank you to CitySprouts for its support of our schools.

Thomas Fowler-Finn
Superintendent of Schools
Cambridge Public Schools

The Harvest Festival this year features an even bigger and better raffle, with some great prizes--free meals at fine restaurants like the Harvest and Casablanca, and gift cards from top local retailers like Henry Bear Park. You can buy tickets at the Festival, so be sure to come on October 2 to get your chance to win.

CitySprouts programs are funded from the following corporate and public sources:

$5,000 or more
Cambridge Public Schools
Growing Healthy Initiative
Whole Foods Market

$2,000 - $5,000
Analog Devices
Cambridge Community Foundation
Clipper Ship Foundation

$500 - $2,000
Biogen
Draper Laboratory
Harvest Co-Operative

And by the generous donations of individuals and families

Have you seen CitySprouts' new website at www.citysprouts.org? Mara Levine, Haggerty parent, employed her professional design skills to re-create CitySprouts website last spring. You can now check the website for upcoming events, updates on the school gardens, pictures of the school gardens, this newsletter and past news articles about CitySprouts. Thanks to Mara Levine for vastly improving CitySprouts electronic face, and for maintaining the site through the year.

Who created that great CitySprouts logo? CitySprouts' logo, our Harvest Festival pumpkin and many other images were created by graphic designer (and Haggerty parent) Jan Ferrara. Jan has volunteered her talent to CitySprouts since the first Haggerty cafeteria 'garden' breakfast. Jan saw that CitySprouts lacked a visual identity, and so she created one that has beautifully captured the essence of CitySprouts.

Who's behind the delightful Harvest Festival? Many people work together to organize CitySprouts' annual celebration of good, family food and outdoor learning--parents from all Cambridge public schools, parents from private schools, chefs, farmers, community activists, and the CitySprouts Board of Directors. One volunteer, though, holds the ends of all the various threads, writes the press releases, calls the meetings and coordinates the volunteers. Deb Gallagher, Peabody parent, works with CitySprouts director Jane Smillie to make this event happen.