You all rocked out the workday!!! SERIOUSLY

Yes... I am talking about YOU. Special thanks, out of all the lovely people I've been fortunate enough to meet at Dickson, to...

Jennie Faile and Spencer Lyerly
Yumiko and Tom Virant
Katy Estrada
Michelle Bedard and Steve Agan
Suzanne Evans
Sharon (Enly's mom)
Emilio Ancaya
Shannon Fields and Matt Menne
Matt Parris
Ellen and Brent Edelman
Xandria Birk
Cordasia
Timbersong Academy
Joan Pinegar
Dorothea Schulz
Bunches of children

Here's a slideshow, that I'm too tired right now to annotate:

We moved four beds, planted the greenhouse, organized the kitchen, installed a Little Free Library, stored 50 hoses for the winter and had a very nice meal together! Big shout outs to Principals Johnson and Cobb for encouraging us, Steve Wyda for designing the garden and Asheville Mulch Yard's Daniel Pope for his amazing soil. I can only hope that EVERY monthly garden work day is as fun and productive as December's :) 

Let me close out our last post of 2016 by saying...may your holidays be full of joy, introspection and plans to grow in new, vigorous and robust ways -- into your family, friends and community. 2017 is a year that will be precious, like any other, and not to be squandered! Let it be the year that you draw a line in the sand, and commit all the extra time that ends up being necessary to hold it. ;)

Won't you come out for our first IDES garden workday?

It's been a couple of weeks since we shared with you some of our goings-ons... so here is some eye candy of that sort:

Outdoor ed, courtesy of the learning/playing station on the NW edge of campus that AVL Greenworks helped install

Pumpkin measuring fun at the outdoor ed centers!

Now that's taking her around the equator :) Mrs. Sizemore's class (not pictured) got to experiment with the biodegrading of pumpkins!

All the fantastic mineral-filled cooking greens that Joan & Co have grown, right out the back door of Dickson classrooms...

Ms. Leslie's class, helping to harvest greens (pretty sure these ended up on plates at the Soul Food Potluck ;)

...let's learn...

How does one cook an egg?   ....

...I'm pretty sure that 'carefully' is part of the recipe :)

Making apple crisp... it takes hands, utensils, and eager minds you know

What our community garden space will look like, after the first seven steps of 'Phase I'

Ms. Ellen's 3rd grade, making personal pizzas

So many yummy olives... now, that is MY kind of pizza!

Mr. Agan did a great job making us a flier for our first big 'Workday' at the garden, next Saturday, Dec. 17th, from 10 AM to 1 PM. He wrote:

We will be getting the greenhouse “ready to grow," moving four raised beds, and moving soil for blueberry bushes and the seating area. Hot chocolate and hot tea will be provided, and the kitchen will be open. High temps likely in the mid-40’s, so dress warmly! (But don’t be discouraged from coming out, just like we do for the HC10K.)

What we are doing, basically, is the first of seven 'stages' that will allow us to complete the first phase of our community garden space at the school. When finished with Phase Three, we will have an educational farm and garden unlike any other in the state!!! Please RSVP to Joan (a link to her email is linked on the upper right of this page) if you plan on coming out...

I sincerely hope to get to meet some of you -- who have been reading our blog and cheering for us but maybe haven't shown up in person yet -- next Saturday. Bring your kids, bring some gloves, and come get dirty and productive with us! =)

A new outdoor learning area... and, 'Phase I' of creating our future community garden space begins!

Joan has been leading the construction of a new outdoor learning area at Dickson, which we would like to be prominently featured in this week's blog post. But before we commit to doing mostly that, we would like to quickly do a bit of a photo digest on other happenings over the past week:

Preparing the toppings for pizzas. Fresh sauce made from vine-ripened tomatoes donated from Juanita's Produce in Candler and hand-picked by Mr. M!

Baking pumpkin bread using flax seed that the students ground into flour by hand

Carving out a pumpkin. Seeds were counted, cleaned, further inspected, even tasted :)

First graders starting up some of their very own microgreens. Yum!

OK, now more on this new outdoor learning area: Fourth grade and reading buddies -- along with the IDES learning garden team and Asheville Greenworks -- are preparing this space so that teachers can take their class outside to have some fun and natural education+play.  Eventually the space will become a pollinator garden full of awesome native trees and other pollinator-friendly plants! We will gladly take teachers and classes (and parents) on a tour if you'd like an orientation of sorts, or... you can head over there with your own gear and plan. Either way, it is awesome and majestic and... please consider bringing some of your own ideas to help us further invent this space!

Students can sit and paint the divine fall foliage of our forest (bring your own paint and brushes) Or, just sit on a freshly sanded mini-log and marvel at the contrast between the sky and the trees. Three deep breaths and your day just changed for the better =)

Pumpkins are a hit! Lots of ideas for how to use them to encourage learning (counting, moving, etc.) are written down at this station, compliments of Ms. Shader

Painting station, and seats enough for an entire classroom to take in the forest view to the north...

Baskets can be used for collecting treasures from nature - pine cones, acorns, flowers , seeds etc sort of like and Easter egg hunt! Take what you find or leave it ... your choice!

We've brought in bunches of seeds, and will continue to bring in more - maybe you have seeds from home that could be added to the pile? Kids can count them, compare shapes, etc.

Buckets can be used to collect rocks and trash and sticks and debris - you might dump filled buckets into the big trash can!

Enjoy these wood pieces - we have so much of them! Please encourage students to take some home or build in the classroom, or up cycle into ornaments or whatever!

Teachers: if you want help (in the form of a person accompanying you) with this and any of our other educational activities planned for the next couple of weeks, please either DROP IN at will or email Joan (link at the top right of the blog) to reserve a day and time that she can plan to work with you. Parents: teachers will let you know if they have garden-related stuff planned for your kids during the day, and how you might join in and help.

Finally, I decided that the signupgenius page was WAY too formalized and cumbersome to recruit extracurricular participation from parents and the community. Instead, Joan and I want to declare permanent volunteer hours open to parents, neighbors of IDES, local businesses, anyone in the Asheville community that doesn't mind getting dirty and gettin' er done:

-- Fridays 3:00 until 5:30 PM

-- Saturdays 1:00 until 4:00 PM (or later, if the tasks at hand demand and the mood permits =)

At the end each blog post (YOU ARE HERE :) we'll describe the focus of the coming week. We do ask that you email Joan if you intend to come, so that we can have a head count / ensure that we have enough snacks and tools on hand. This coming Friday and Saturday we'll be:

1) Building some microgreen 'garden-in-a-pot/tub/etc's for classrooms to keep right outside their doors

2) Executing on Phase 1 of our Community Garden space: Relocating raised beds

Hope to hear from those of you that want to get involved with the garden -- either during the school day or afterschool at the end of the week / outside normal school hours!

What's been going on...

Hey there, friend of the IDES Learning Garden!

We've had a lot of fun stuff going on in the past couple weeks... on the logistics side of things, the school's parent-teacher organization (PTO) passed a budget that included several allocations for expanding the garden's operations -- including the possibility of getting more food prep and cooking happening. All that we are hoping to do is contingent on fundraising that we hope to be successful at in the coming months, so please don't shy away from being even just a little part part of what we do. Even just buying something from us now and again, or making a small donation, can make a world of difference :)

Now, take a moment to enjoy a brief photo-digest of some of the goings-on of the past week:

IDES students get 'hands-on' with delivering and spreading mulch on campus

Lemonade for students, made possible by Early Girl Eatery, King Daddy's Restaurant and Mountain Valley Water! Thank you!

4th graders share oatmeal with fresh toppings every Friday as they study nutrition

Joele and Rick from Asheville Greenworks assessing our campus as we prepare for more trees

Ms. Brenda planting milkweed seeds together with her kindergartners

Dickson PTO renting and staffing a real apple press, making dozens of gallons of cider for kids to enjoy

A lesson in how bread begins... students grinding wheat and flax sseds into meal and flour

Ms. Moore's first graders hanging out with Swankie the duck

We've got a lot of work to do to get our program back up to speed (now that we're in this beautiful new building and this campus that just teems with possibilities =). To help us do all that we need to do, we're hoping that you can commit to spending one or more Friday afternoons helping us with some of the bigger fish that we've got to fry. We've got important volunteer work going on every Friday from 3:00 until 5:00 or 5:30... If we can get you out here, then we can get 'you' to start becoming 'us' -- and that is EXACTLY what we need!

That is all for now. I dearly look forward to hearing from some of you (via Blogger comments and emails) and even SEEING some of you getting dirty with us on Friday afternoons =)