School Salad Harvest

Time to harvest the cool weather crops in the school courtyard!  Our afterschool enrichment class brought in the goodies that were planted in August and made a salad with them.  Here's what we picked:

Broccoli,

arugula and butter lettuce,

Red Romaine,

fennel and beet greens, 

 

"Sungold" cherry tomatoes,

 

and

“watermelon” radishes!

The kids put on their gloves and pulled the ingredients out of the raised beds.   Each had  their own tub for collection.  They were brought inside and washed in one of the classroom sinks.  Then, we went outside and took the choicest bits, mixing them together in a big wooden bowl, along with our own salad dressing. 

This was an afterschool activity with about  10 children who elected to take “Fall Gardening” as an enrichment class, along with a few middle school helpers who are accumulating community service hours.   Our hope is to expand this with a similar project for the entire school.   In February, we’d like to have the kids start the seeds in the greenhouse, so that we can harvest in June before school ends for the summer.  Here’s more info about the “Seed to Salad” curriculum, developed by Cornell.

Maybe we’ll even get some of these goodies into the school cafeteria one of these days!

This week, I'm joining the "Harvest Monday" group over at Daphne's Dandelions - if you are a vegetable grower, you need to follow this blog!   On Mondays, vegetable growers from around the world post about their harvests and link there.