Now is the busiest time for planting our ‘flagship’ veggies- all of the ones we get excited about picking up at the farmers markets, getting in our CSA boxes, or best of all, ripening on the vine in our very own gardens! At Common Ground Garden the grains are maturing and beginning to harden (rye being the last to mature), as the tomatoes and zucchini are just going into their respective beds. Our sunflowers have grown high enough to escape the slug onslaught, and our basil is looking small but plump beneath the sunflower canopy. Soon we’ll be planting our cucumbers, beets, and beginning to plant summer grains like amaranth. Wish us luck! And stop by to see it all at its peak during our Edible Garden Tour.

Still need seeds? Get your open pollinated heirlooms from Bountiful Gardens this year!

The last two months have been really busy keeping up with our tight early planting schedule. We planted crops with our youth groups: potatoes, favas, peas. With our adult volunteers, we started tons of flats: quinoa, lettuce, cabbage, carrots, tomatoes, basil, and planted cilantro and dill directly into a bed. We transplanted out many early starts into the garden: sprouting broccoli, quinoa, sunflowers (for the ‘Great Sunflower Project’). This week, we’ll be planting onions, lettuce, and cabbage.

As the New Year begins at CGG, we take valuable time to reflect on both where we have been and where we want to go. Last semester showed a slowdown in our youth garden classes, but this spring they are beginning again with new fervor. We have doubled the number of middle school classes we hold in our garden, while holding our number of preschool and high school classes steady. As a result, we welcome around 250 students from local schools into our garden for classes each month. Common Ground Garden enjoys the unique privilege of being located within walking distance of almost 3,000 students, aged pre K-12 th grade. This allows us to work closely with Young Life Preschool, Terman Middle School, and Gunn High School to run monthly garden classes for students of all ages.

In addition to our regular classes with these three schools, we offer field trips to all schools in the San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. We work hard to make our field trips financially accessible to all. Thanks to a grant from Palo Alto Holiday Fund, we offer free field trips to qualifying Title 1 schools. This year, we hope to focus our lessons to include more material on nutrition and sustainable food production. The prevalence of fast food in our society is a huge detriment to the health of our most vulnerable populations, including children and typically marginalized communities. Without a taste for, or access to fresh local foods, the health of our community is in danger. Currently, 75% of all money spent on healthcare in America goes to prevent chronic, preventable diseases. More than half of that money is spent treating the long-term effects of a poor diet.* Our educational programs this year will take action to address this nutritional crisis in America.

With our high school classes from Gunn, we already focus on grain production and cooking food that has been grown, harvested, and processed in the garden. We will expand on this program, and also introduce it to the middle school groups. By the end of the semester, we aim to have each student try a fresh vegetable they haven’t had before, and understand the process through which grains are processed and packaged for the grocery store. When students think of flour, we want them to picture harvesting, threshing, and milling stalks of wheat – not a white substance that appears magically in the baking aisle. By emphasizing healthy foods and a true understanding of where they come from, we hope to improve the overall health of our 250 regular students.

*Michael Pollan. “The Rise of Industrial Agriculture.” Edible Education 101 (Info / Video).

Over all, January is a time for some rest and recuperation- but, by mid month we are picking up the pace a little. The hardy rutabaga seedlings we started in the green house are ready to be planted out at this Wednesday’s volunteer day. We have also started flats of onions and fava beans. Soon, we’ll be starting many of our leafy greens including lettuce, arugula, and spinach.

Now is the time to get your mini-orchard established. At Saturday’s Bare-root Fruit Tree Planting class, participants installed two blueberries, an apple rootstock (that we’ll graft onto on Feb. 4th’s class).

On Veteran’s Day, a wonderful group of 25 girl scouts, aged between 10-16,  came to the garden and helped us to plant around 30 native plants in a new ‘native bed’ at the back of the garden. They donated the funds we used to purchase the plants (from Yerba Buena Nursery in Half Moon Bay). At a follow-up meeting, the girls were asked for one word to describe the experience and they replied: “Fun, Enlightening, Interesting, and Hard Work”. We started the session by explaining why native plants are important (habitat and fodder for our endangered pollinators, help to form a drought tolerant ecosystem, and so on) and then we got to work clearing the area, digging holes, planting, and finally mulching to suppress weeds. The new bed will need to be watered sporadically during the coming year’s dry season, but will be left to its own devices afterwards.

Emma Cao a 5th grade Junior Girl Scout reflected on the day, “I think the experience was something very special. It’s not all day when you can help out in a garden and help plant native plants! I learned that the most important thing in gardening you need is probably teamwork. I figured that it would be much harder to plant by ourselves, because one person had to hold the plant up to ground level, and another person had to fill in in the hole with soil. This Veteran’s Day project meant a lot to me because I knew that people would enjoy the work we did, and how wonderful and better the world would be with all the plants around, because of the nice colors, and how they produce oxygen.”