• Topics this year include, native seeds, seed saving, bees, garden and orchard technical support, grant tips and more!

• Local foods lunch featured by Trenton Elementary Chef

• CEUs and certificates awarded to educators

Early Registration $35 available until April 19th



Our friends at MOFGA are helping us manage online registration this year, we are thankful for this and the many partnerships that make MSGD a wonderful success!

For mail in registration forms click here.

Scholarships available thanks to Maine Agriculture in the Classroom.

Stay posted 0n our Facebook event page.

Located in the beautiful coastal city of Belfast, Maine, Captain Albert Stevens School is comprised of about 300 K-5 students. For many years, we have been committed to being a healthy and active school. Our garden has been run by 5th grade students with support from community volunteers. Currently, our school staff is actively working to make the garden easy to access for all classrooms who want to participate. This year, CASS has a FoodCorps service member, Malia Demers, and she along with many teachers and staff, are working to make the garden program more self-sustaining and expand its reach!

The summer before Malia began her service at CASS, a team of staff and community members went to the Farm to School Institute at Shelburne Farms to develop an action plan for the school. Viña Lindley, from the UMaine Cooperative Extension is our school’s coach. One exciting thing this team is working towards is a community meal. At the March meal, students will display their work connecting with our school garden and join hands in creating and cooking a meal for our friends and families. The meal will have a Maple Syrup theme and will highlight other local products such as Maine grains, root vegetables and dairy. Thanks to the Read ME ag program & Maine Agriculture in the classroom, nearly all our teachers will be receiving a picture book about maple sugaring.

New this year to our school is a Farm to School professional development group of about nine teachers. The hours teachers spend sharing resources, experiences and planning for the future of the garden are counted as contact hours for recertification. Goals include building six raised beds right outside the Kindergarten and 1st grade classes.

About 140 students have “Garden Class” with Malia on a monthly, bi-weekly, or weekly basis. During class time, kids are planting, harvesting, and exploring the garden; and cooking, tasting and learning about food. One of the topics students have been exploring lately has been composting and decomposition. 3rd grade students started composting snack scraps in their classrooms and conducted a waste audit of the trash and compost produced in the cafeteria in collaboration with Viña Lindley. After this experience, students made posters and PSA videos, and ran a composting station at our school’s first “Zero Waste Lunch Day,” helping their peers learn how to sort their lunch leftovers into trash and “treasure” (compostable materials & recyclable resources). Another “Zero Waste Lunch Day has been planned for late February by our school’s Belfast Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle (BRRRR) student group led by Tish Manning.

Many teachers integrate food and gardening topics into academic subjects and many classrooms regularly work with skilled outdoor and sustainability educators such as Hannah Raymond from Tanglewood 4H center, and Jeni Flower from the Belfast Bay watershed coalition. Currently seven classrooms are composting food scraps from snack time. Those scraps get emptied into our wooden pallet compost pile by the garden, and some classrooms have worm bins!

About once a month, Malia will do a taste test of a healthy food in the cafeteria. Often this will be a local/seasonal fruit or vegetable in a small portion so kids can give it a taste in a fun way! She will set up a whiteboard with information, jokes, and pictures or examples of the item.

This fall, we entered butternut squash, pumpkin, garlic, and heirloom bean varieties into the Common Ground Country fair exhibition hall with “school garden grown” stickers provided by the Maine School Garden Network. We received quite a few blue and red ribbons and it was a great way to celebrate and recognize the hard work of everyone who made the garden’s harvest possible!

Follow our adventures on our Facebook Page: CASS School Garden Food & Wellness
Learn more about the Zero Waste student led movement at CASS here.
 

Curious about the Read ME ag program from Maine Agriculture in the Classroom? Check out their website! Will your classroom be enjoying this year's book on maple syrup?

We look forward to introducing you to a new MSGN board member each month here in the newsletter and hope to shake hands at future events and workshops!

If you are interested in becoming a board member or discovering volunteer opportunities with MSGN please send us an email.

Cover Crops in School Gardens

“It looks like grass” was a very innocent statement a colleague shared with a student of mine.   The child responded, “We want that grass because it is rye and it is helping the soil”

           Cover Crops are easy to grow and take care of in a school garden.  At Sebago Elementary we have tried both legumes and grasses and both classes of cover crops work well.  We have raised beds that were built over  a very hard rocky school yard, so the soil profile is limited.   There are issues above and below the soil horizon.   Prior to using cover crops in our rotations we had to dump huge volumes of material annually so we could get plants to grow.   In terms on energy this wasn’t sustainable and we want to show students soil can be improved without huge outside inputs.  Using cover crops not only feeds the soil, it keeps it covered and keeps living roots in the soil.   Also where school gardens aren’t necessarily supplying a huge amount of food, but rather are getting kids engaged and interested in gardening and food, using the space for cover crops opens up a whole new area of educational opportunities.  

      In terms of care and management not much could be easier than growing cover crops with students.   Winter rye for example is broadcast in the fall and either turned under in the spring or crushed.   We have also cut rye at the milk stage and dried it for straw mulch.  Broadcasting seed is very easy for young children to do.  The worst thing that could happen, is it is spread unevenly.  Simply having students walk across the surface pushes the seed into contact with the soil and that takes care of planting.   Weeding the bed isn’t an issue because the cover crop covers the soil and smothers many annual weeds.   We have found our raised beds dry out like the desert, but those that are in cover crops require much less water.   Depending on the depth of soil, deep rooted legumes may not be as successful but there are many options.    Grains such as wheat, barley and oats can be sown in the fall.   They die over the winter so you don’t have to worry about how to deal with it in the springtime. Those grains sown in the spring can be left to mature and students can go through the threshing, winnowing seed saving process.    FEDCO and Johnny’s Selected Seeds are two sources of cover crop seed. Jason Lilley from the Cumberland County Extension office is a great resource for cover crop ideas, insights and management.   

Stay tuned for a follow up from Ted regarding methods for growing cover crops that meet an array of NGSS Standards, as well as how this fits into sustainable farming and gardening.   Broadcast cover crops seeds, and reap the benefits of healthier soil and students who are learning to take care of their gardens above and below the surface.