ESY Berkeley Journal

The 6th grade humanities classes have returned to the kitchen for their spring rotation, which journeys through four great civilizations: India, China, Greece, and Rome. For their first lesson back, the students listened to Indian music and learned to make a vegetable curry. Many were surprised to hear that curry is actually a mix of spices that varies from region to region and doesn't derive from just one plant.

The curry we made starts with toasting whole cardamom pods, cumin seeds, coriander seeds, brown mustard seeds, and black peppercorns over low heat until fragrant and the seeds start to pop. Those spices are then ground by hand in a mortar and pestle with turmeric and red chili flakes.

We sauteed spring onions from the garden with the ground curry, then added fingerling potatoes, carrots, cabbage, and rainbow chard together with coconut milk and vegetable stock. The finished dish was served over brown basmati rice, which soaked up the beautiful golden liquid perfectly.

Some of the curry spices on our spice table

Toasting the spices not only creates a more robust taste, but also made the whole kitchen smell like cardamom

Grinding spices with a mortar and pestle

Cooking the spices with spring onions from the garden

Cooking the curry

The finished platter

One part cloning, one part surgery, and one part fruit production: grafting apple trees is an irresistible combination for our sixth grade students in the garden.  This is the second year we have had grafting classes with students, and our success last year at making viable apple trees inspired to us to order more root stock and continue on with the process this year.

Grafting is a fine art that is perfected over years of practice. While pruning the apple trees this year, the garden teachers saved scion (first year wood) from some of our favorite varieties of apples, including Pink Pearl, Sierra Beauty, Golden Russet, and Spitzenburg, to name a few.  Students essentially clone these trees, by attaching the scion from the delicious varieties of apple to a root stock, which is basically an apple tree bred not for the fruit, but for strong, disease-resistant roots.  We use a grafting tool to cut a puzzle piece shape into both the root stock and the scion, and then carefully attach the two pieces and bandage up the union with tape.  If the cambium (the living part of the wood, just under the bark) of the scion and the cambium of the root stock touch, then the tree will heal over the wound and continue to grow.  Students were thrilled to imagine the possibilities that grafting trees provided; specifically, many got excited about 'Franken-trees' that produce a different variety of apple on every branch. We experimented a little with that in the garden this year, and hopefully next spring our plum trees will have branches that bear pluots!  Grafting fruit trees is also gratifying work because we can take something we have already (twigs from our existing trees) and use it to make new trees which we can plant, sell, or give away.  Many of the fruit trees that students grafted will be for sale at our plant sale/fundraiser in May.

Successful graft union fom last year (the greener wood is root stock, and browner wood is fruiting scion)

Our growing apple tree nursery for recently grafted trees

A close up of one of our lovely small trees

This week, the seventh graders continued to hone their kitchen skills by paring, peeling, slicing, and chopping various garden vegetables to create our version of maki sushi.  We prepared garden radishes, daikon sprouts, carrots, sushi rice, avocado, and tamago (a traditional Japanese egg dish cooked on the griddle). These ingredients were put in bowls in the middle of a table, and students were able to pick their own ingredients and wrap them in seaweed to make a unique sushi roll.

Each student was able to create several rolls, and with practice the rolls got easier to eat. It was a good exercise in managing proportions: too much rice or vegetables would make the rolls very difficult to seal, creating a cascade of carrots and radish when the eating began. Many students had never tried many of the ingredients let alone created dishes with them, and it turned out to be one of their favorite lessons.

Cooking the egg to make tamago

Slicing the tamago to use in the rolls

A few of the beautifully prepared sushi fillings

One of the finished rolls

This past week, we tried something new to help us bridge lessons in the garden to those in the school classroom. We spent the days in the garden with King’s Counseling Enriched Curriculum (CEC) program, which is made up of students who, for a variety of reasons, do not thrive in mainstream classrooms. In previous years, we have trickled the CEC garden classes into our regular schedule, but we decided to experiment with a week-long immersion to see what would happen.

We began our mornings in the garden with regular garden classes: we turned five huge heaps of compost and cultivated a long bed in the back of the garden and planted it with beautiful broccoli plants from the greenhouse. After our garden classes, the ESY garden teachers joined the CEC students for their physical education classes. We participated in several student versus staff basketball games; while we looked to our sub-par garden footwear as an excuse for losing, there is really no other way to say it: we got schooled on the court.

The CEC immersion integrated well the work we do in the garden with the students and the work they are doing with their classroom teachers. Each student completed a research project on a relevant garden related theme such as compost, worms, ladybugs, mushrooms, plants as medicine, chicken care, and potato towers. Their mission was to create a poster that included facts, quotes, photographs, and written paragraphs about their topics, as well as an oral presentation on their theme. Students completed research in the classroom with the help of the garden staff and their dedicated teachers and aides. Aside from researching their themes through books and the internet, students were able to understand their topics through hands-on application. For example, a student who was researching plants as medicine got to familiarize himself firsthand with medicinal plants we have growing in the garden such as calendula, mint, and lavender. Another student who was studying worms was able to get up close and personal with worms as he was cultivating during garden class.

The week culminated with students presenting their research projects to their peers, teachers, and some family members out in the garden, followed by a pizza party that CEC students created. They harvested, washed, and prepared fresh toppings from the garden, mixed ingredients for the pizza dough, and built and cooked incredibly delicious pizzas in our wood-fired oven. We were all able to celebrate the CEC students' hard work in the garden and on their research projects by enjoying pizza and salad together in the ESY kitchen classroom. Overall, the CEC immersion week was a great success and with a little bit of fine tuning, we plan to repeat this same program again year after year.

Turning compost

The bed we cultivated together         The finished bed of broccoli