Greens and Garlic Galore!

Our school garden is overflowing with three kinds of kale, Malabar spinach, and Swiss chard. We want to share the bounty. If you would like to pick your own, please feel welcome to follow instructions on the signs. The garden is located on the east side of the path to the Upper Building.

If you want help learning your way around the garden, Maya will be available on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays after school, and Susan will be around most weekends to offer help.

Our guest speaker last spring from Eat Right America emphasized the value of leafy green vegetables in our diets. Here’s a chance to try out some new recipes. We are offering the greens free to those of you who would enjoy them.

We also have garlic, which was planted by students last fall and harvested by a team of parents, teachers and students in July. The garlic is for sale, both now and in the Holiday Catalog. It can be planted in your home garden in late October or used throughout the year in your favorite recipes. The large bulbs are $2 each and are available by emailing garlic@santbani.org.

Our school garden is working to fulfill its mission of helping students and their families to view themselves as unique members of a larger social unit; to see their food as part of an interconnected network; to learn gardening techniques; and to gain an understanding of the value of physical outdoor work. We would love to hear from you. If you have suggestions or would like to comment about how we are doing, please email garlic@santbani.org.

Opechee Garden Club Grant Awarded to Sant Bani School Environmental Studies Intern, Travis Filter

SANBORNTON: In the fall of 2008 Environmental Science teacher Todd Schongalla and his students decided to take the classroom to the soil. They reclaimed a fallow plot and planted an organic garlic garden that yielded 500 heads of garlic in August of 2009. The juicy pungent garlic sold out in a matter of weeks. This school year the crop size was doubled and 1000 bulbs of garlic are now slowly sending up garlic scapes from the earth waiting for the cloves to grow in order to be sold later this summer at the school and at local Farmers’ Markets. A crop of kale was added as well and with the help of the school’s intern, the gardens that students walk past every day have become part of their classrooms and playing fields.

Sant Bani School alumnus and Environmental Studies Intern Travis Filter arrived on campus in March to begin a late winter/early spring internship at Sant Bani School under the direction of Susan Dyment, the school’s Admissions Director and College Counselor. Dyment is a life-long gardener and was excited to oversee Filter’s course work for Lesley College. Filter has spent his time observing, sharing, and teaching and has been joined in the school’s gardens by students from kindergarten through grade twelve to learn the joys and rewards of working the earth.

Filter and Dyment enrolled in the UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener’s course. Each Tuesday through the winter and early spring this gardening duo traveled to Goffstown to hone their skills and broaden their knowledge of gardening. During this period Filter also applied to the Opechee Garden Club for its annual grant from the Evergreen Fund. The fund is earmarked for individuals or not-for-profit organizations that wish to pursue projects or advanced studies to promote educational and/or career building skills within the disciplines of conservation, environment science, forestry, agriculture, horticulture, landscape design or any other area supported by the club with a focus on the environment.

In April Filter was awarded the Opechee Garden Club’s grant for $500. Asked what he plans to spend the grant on and he says, “I hope to buy hand tools sized to fit small children as well as the older students. Markers and small whiteboards will be bought and used to diagram garden plots in the classroom and carried out to the garden. I also have bought potting soil and shop lighting for grow lights with pulley systems for the school’s renovated greenhouse in order to get that back up and running. I want to buy infrastructure to support the school’s gardens and educational material for the classrooms.”

In short, he has put the grant towards exactly what it was intended for. Sant Bani School is a non-profit school educating children from kindergarten through grade twelve. The assistance the grant will give to enrich the students’ knowledge of gardening will pay off both now and far into the future when some of them may begin their own gardens built from the lessons they learned from an inspired intern at the hillside gardens of the Sant Bani School.

Filter showcased his internship for the public last May at Sant Bani School. He had samplings of his garden for tasting as well as a slide show and information session. The public was welcomed to attend and joined in tasting how delicious a garden can be.