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Farm & Food Studies Fall Season Recap
Farm & Food Studies have been hard at work this fall, growing food, using plant-based materials, cooking, and much more. Read about their season!
Farm & Food Studies have been hard at work this fall, growing food, using plant-based materials, cooking, and much more. Read about their season!
Lots of Learning
We launched Farm to Plate class this fall, in which students practice growing, maintaining, and harvesting vegetables and then using them to cook healthy and delicious food. Highlights from the fall include harvesting potatoes, pressing apple cider, planting garlic, helping prepare the Yellow Tulip garden on campus, and making soup from the Vermont state vegetable, Gilfeather turnips!
Ethnobotany students have been exploring some of the many ways humans can use plants in daily life by trying out cooking, material uses, and plant medicine. Highlights from the fall include making a rainbow of colors with plant-based dyes from the garden, sharing a meal with dishes each made from a specific plant family, and making 5 gallons(!) of fire cider with plant medicine ingredients grown in our garden and greenhouse.
This fall our Farm Skills Intern has been helping to keep the busy harvest season running smoothly by harvesting and weeding vegetables, hauling loads of compost, helping to organize tools and materials, and growing delicious microgreens for the school cafeteria.
In addition to on-site Farm and Food Studies courses, several groups of students have made it to the farm for trips. Two groups of 9th graders worked hard to harvest potatoes, clear garden beds, and more on Service Day. Medieval History students hand-processed wheat from the garden to try making simple food with little modern technology. Students from the Target program harvested vegetables to use in their culinary class. Exchange students from both Ecuador and Germany visited for a taste of Vermont agriculture with farm tours and service projects.
Community Partnerships
Students grew and harvested another season of three sisters crops for the Abenaki Land Link Project, with a Farm and Food Studies record bean crop (40 pounds of dry, shelled skunk beans!). The beans, along with flint corn and winter squash, were returned to the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation for their community seed sovereignty and food access programs. This year’s German Exchange students were a huge help in the final push to get all that amazing crop of beans harvested!
The student garden continues to produce fresh food for programs in our community that get food to people who need it. Grateful Hearts Manchester has cooked up student-grown cabbage and other veggies into amazing, delicious, nutritious meals in our very own cafeteria kitchen. Farm to Plate class packaged dried herbs from our garden for the Manchester Community Food Cupboard before Thanksgiving to add some flavor to our neighbors’ holiday season.
Community partners have also hosted student learning off-site. Ethnobotany students helped scientists and our local Ranger from the US Forests Service survey tree planting survival in Manchester. This is the fourth year that students have been involved in monitoring the site, where the Forest Service and other community partners are working on riparian restoration along the Battenkill. Ethnobotany also traveled to Danby to learn about local, regenerative fiber and dye plant production and processing with farmer, fiber artist, researcher and educator Andrea Myklebust at Mountain Heart Farm.
Looking Ahead
Winter is certainly making its arrival known this year! While the garden is being blanketed in snow, students are gearing up for winter vegetable production in the amazing teaching greenhouse that we share with Hildene. Students will be growing hardy winter greens and other cold-tolerant vegetables to provide produce to international students in the dorms, to our cafeteria, and to our community partners working on local food access. Winter also brings the beginning of the maple sugaring season and preparations for the next season in the garden. The cycle continues!
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