Edible Gardens & Environment

PSGC began its work on food systems literacy by funding, establishing and maintaining Edible Gardens at all six schools in the Princeton Public Schools district. Our next step was to fund Edible Gardens stewards/instructors to make each garden unique to its students and to foster curricular connections and to connect children to the natural systems that support all life.

Select a school from the drop-down menu to see edible garden activity there.

Michelle Obama served tomatoes, Bent Spoon cupcakes made with herbs from school gardens

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Gab Carbone, owner of Bent Spoon ice cream, used mint, lavender and lemon balm harvested from Littlebrook Elementary School Edible Gardens to flavor cupcakes served to First Lady Michelle Obama at a recent lunch in Princeton.

First Lady Michelle Obama, champion of good food, edible gardens and invigorating exercise regimens, was served produce from Littlebrook and Riverside school gardens at a lunch she attended last Sunday to raise funds for the re-election campaign of President Barack Obama.

Max Hansen, whose eponymously named catering company of Pipersville, PA, provided the meal, said that guests were served cherry tomatoes and basil from Riverside Elementary School gardens along with Comeback Farm (Hunterdon County, NJ) heirloom tomatoes in a salad of Blue Moon Acres (Pennington, NJ and Buckingham, PA) baby greens. For dessert, Mr. Hansen served Gab Carbone’s Bent Spoon cupcakes slathered with a choice of three buttercream frostings infused with herbs from the Littlebrook Elementary school garden: lavender, lemon balm and chocolate mint. He said that he was able to mention to the First Lady that the herbs were picked from Princeton School Gardens.

The lunch was served in the back gardens of Andy and Carol Golden’s home, overlooking a valley behind North Snowden Lane, near Herrontown Road.

Riverside kindergarten students eat their words

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By Assenka Oksiloff
Princeton Regional Schools

Research shows that children’s literacy skills improve when their reading and writing experiences are meaningful to them. At PRS, educators have taken this lesson to heart, designing innovative lessons and programs that make the written word come alive in imaginative – and delicious – ways.

In Jennifer Bazin’s kindergarten class at Riverside Elementary School, 17 students were recently treated to a culinary sampling while reading Maurice Sendak’s classic, “Chicken Soup with Rice,” in a lesson co-taught by Dorothy Mullen, the school’s garden artist-in-residence.

The lesson is part of a winter series on literature and food that Ms. Mullen has designed for the classes of Ms. Bazin and Linda Bruschi, who also teaches kindergarten at Riverside. Using an interactive, inter-disciplinary approach, Mullen packed the lesson full of goodies that included a reading of Sendak’s book, a review of the months of the year and the seasonal cycles, a song, and, of course, the pièce de resistance: chicken soup with rice.

Ms. Mullen’s position is funded by the Riverside PTO, who sought to develop a garden-based education program across all grades. Under her direction, in collaboration with the teachers, the children do garden lessons about 10 – 12 times per year.

During the winter months, they engage in lessons involving literature and food. This year, the kindergarteners have also tasted Stone Soup, Tops and Bottoms Soup, and Black Swallowtail Butterfly Host Plant Soup. “This is a way of bringing the garden into the classroom when we can’t go outside,” Mullen explained.

Before eating the soup, the students took a careful inventory of the ingredients in Sendak’s soup: chicken, rice, broth, carrots, celery and cabbage. They also pledge to honor Mullen’s simple rule: “You don’t have to eat something you don’t like, but no ‘yuck.’

In this case, there was no need for the rule. The soup received an overwhelming thumbs-up, with many requests for seconds. After the tasting, the group discussed plant growth and made plans for spring planting.

For Mullen, the connections between learning, gardening and eating add a nutritional and environmental component to the lesson. “We get our ingredients from our school, which gives a sense of sustainable living,” said Ms. Mullen, who is a founding member of the Princeton School Gardens Cooperative and has taught Master Gardeners of Mercer County how to become school gardeners. “Kids are actively involved when growing peas and carrots, and they are more likely to eat those vegetables when they grow them.”

Based on the data gathered about food preferences at the end of the lesson — almost all enjoyed the carrots, and two-thirds found the celery and cabbage delicious — she is correct.

Fall 2011

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This fall, Littlebrook welcomed Lesley Bush to its garden team as Garden Educator.  Lesley is a former science teacher and master gardener and will be teaching garden lessons to each class in the school five times over the course of the year.  In her lessons this fall, each grade started work on its Grade Garden Project for the year, and participated in the school-wide harvest of fall crops.

Another highlight this fall was preparing fresh-from-the-garden veggies right in the classroom using a new cooking cart, which was donated by PSGC through its Garden State on Your Plate grant.  First graders made a rubbed kale salad, with celery and nasturtiums, for the welcome back family picnic.  Kindergarteners made a pear sauce from our prolific pear tree.  Fourth graders cooked up butternut squash from the three sisters bed.  And fifth graders tasted roasted eggplant dip, made from our own eggplants by LB mom and chef, Jen Carson.

The kids brought in the remaining crops just before this year’s fall freeze and they were displayed at a Harvest Table at the pancake breakfast on October 29.  Families and staff in attendance got to bring home a bag of fresh LB-grown veggies!