Voices of the Movement

We are pleased to introduce the latest members of the Edible Schoolyard community: Our three new ducks! Originally rescued from Oakland’s Lake Merritt, these ducks were raised with love and care by a friend, Timbo, at his East Oakland backyard and were generously donated to the program. The two tall, slender ducks are Indian Runners; native to Indonesia, these ducks are great egg layers and like their name implies, fast runners. The larger white duck is some kind of Campbell cross. Campbells are also great egg layers, and are terrific foragers.

Why ducks, you might ask?

There are all kinds of wonderful fruits and vegetables coming into season for the holidays. But when I think of fall, one fruit always seems to top the list... apples! Yes, apple season is upon us, and with it comes a number of tasty varieties to delight one's senses.

Last spring, three small milkweed plants sprouted up in the middle of one of our garden beds.  We dug the milkweed up when we cultivated the bed, but not before carefully saving seeds from these fuzzy, silvery plants and nursing them to germination in our greenhouse.  Our intention was to plant the new milkweed starts in the garden's perennial flower borders, and leave the more central garden beds for vegetable production.

For gardeners, things don't always go as planned.

To our chagrin, the milkweed came up in full force all over the garden, in the cultivated garden beds as well as in t

The sound of 30 voices yelling "panzanella!" was the rallying call heard in the kitchen today. Our esteemed 8th graders, most with two years of kitchen experience under their belts, were back and getting right to work combining our fall harvest of tomatoes, cucumbers, summer squash, basil, and shallots with vinaigrette and day-old bread to make the quintessential end-of-summer treasure: panzanella.