CitySprouts 4th Annual Harvest Festival a resounding success

Thank you to our sponsors, Whole Foods Market and Growing Healthy, and to our volunteers for a great Harvest Festival!

On October 2nd 600 children and adults enjoyed the 4th annual Festival. Families made crafts, ate, talked, listened to live music and had a good old time at the Peabody School on Rindge Avenue. Kids decorated pumpkins, made colorful prints with cut out vegetables, strung cranberry necklaces, pressed apples into cider, and peeled vegetables for Stone Soup.

Meanwhile, the Festival raised close to $10,000 for CitySprouts programs, a record for our signature event.

Over 1,000 children in the gardens this fall

The numbers are in--1,041 Cambridge schoolchildren used their school garden this fall. That's twice the number of children in their school garden last year at this time! Why the increase? Garden coordinators are working with more classes during the school day (and more older students compared to last year), and more teachers are taking their class out to the garden independently of the garden coordinator. These numbers are a strong indication that Cambridge public school gardens are working for teachers as well as for children!

CitySprouts participation records for Fall 2004 at each school:
Haggerty: 231
King Open: 258
Morse: 274
Peabody: 251
Total: 1,041

CitySprouts site

On December 17, our Executive Director, Jane Smillie, accepted the Haggerty Peace Prize for her part in building the CitySprouts program at the Haggerty School. Jane commended the Haggerty community for creating beautiful and beloved gardens in their schoolyard, and "making peace happen by sharing something they love with people beyond their circle of friends."

Gardens are a place for lots of different kinds of lessons.

Kindergartners at the Morse made weekly and biweekly visits, checking out the ABC Bed, harvesting tomatoes, sampling broccoli, and planting radishes. First graders sat under the Morse's own apple tree and made careful sketches of apples in cross section, to complement their unit on Johnny Appleseed. Third graders planted winter wheat as part of a research project on Ancient Rome's Bread and Circuses.

Mr. Klinman's fourth graders piloted a literacy experiment: over the course of several weeks, the students produced 'best-effort' drawings and descriptions of things they'd observed in the garden: ripening tomatoes, sprawling pumpkin vines, fragile-looking slug eggs, and herbs, as shown in our illustration.

Seventh graders have been gathering data on biodiversity in the garden, capturing organisms for identification and classification, using pitfall traps. And the Morse Special Needs class used the rain gauge, measured corn, picked (and ate) a watermelon; and began to dig a new bed.

Over ten classes at the King Open School harvested and ate some of the delicious roots and shoots growing in their schoolyard garden. Second graders even cooked up beets right in their classroom! And though it may be a cold winter, many 1-2 classes have brought the garden indoors with a Narcissus Bulb growing experiment.

Lots of harvesting and cooking was happening at the Haggerty School this fall as well. The after school classes were hard at work keeping the gardens composted, the beds clean and were treated to many delicacies for their efforts. They ate tomatillos, watermelon, musk melon, squash, garlic, peppers, carrots, onions and baby corn. Children harvested many potatoes (red, yellow and blue) and pumpkins for soup they made and sold on Election day. They also made pumpkin pies and bread to share as the growing season came to a close.

At the Peabody School second graders studied all about soil as well as the Three Sisters, a native American cultural method of growing beans, corn and squash together. They ate corn from the garden and collected dry Jacob's Cattle beans to plant next year. Third graders looked at habitats, adaptations, and camouflage in the garden and created their own classroom worm habitat in the form of vermin-composting bins, where red wiggler worms help to recycle trash by eating our leftover fruits and vegetables and turning it into nutrient-rich soil.

Cafeteria events return this year. Thanks to funding from the CPS physical education department, CitySprouts and Cambridge School Food Service will continue the monthly vegetable tasting in the school cafeteria. January was broccoli month. All the children sampled fresh broccoli with yummy ranch dressing.

The CitySprouts fall appeal netted over $6,000 for CitySprouts programs! Thanks to Becka Smillie, Martha Eddison Sieniewicz and Sarah Norman for their efforts on behalf of CitySprouts.

The CitySprouts annual Volunteer Party will take place on April 3. Save the date!

CitySprouts receives support from the following public and corporate sources:
Eisner Family Foundation, Llewellyn Foundation, Whole Foods Market, Cambridge Public Schools, City of Cambridge Community Schools, Clipper Ship Foundation, Cambridge Community Foundation, Slow Food Boston, Analog Devices, The Boston Foundation, Draper Lab, Biogen, Harvest Co-Op Community Funds, and W.R. Grace.