– inscription at Dolores Elementary School by William Butler Yeats
Under a sodden late June sky and a steady drizzle of rain, this year’s crop of AmeriCorps workers labors in the Dolores School Garden. If Alice in Wonderland and Bill Nye the Science Guy got together and planned an agricultural learning adventure, this might be what the result would look like.
The garden – a long narrow strip between the athletic field and the mesa that leads to Boggy Draw – beckons the curious to come and explore. And it functions as the learning playground to more than 400 Dolores students in preschool through seventh grade.
A branch of the far-reaching Montezuma School to Farm Project, the Dolores School Garden is in its fifth year of operation, currently under the direction of Megan Tallmadge, coordinator for the garden and Production Manager for School to Farm.
The small garden is densely packed with educational components. Upon entering, you pass a compact lesson on composting painted on handmade signs: carbon rich brown materials such as leaves, straw, twigs, cardboard, paper, and dryer lint can be combined with nitrogen-rich greens like coffee grounds, food scraps, eggshells, grass and weeds. Next, the decomposers – the resultant bacteria, fungi, and the invertebrates such as worms – are aided by the addition of air, water, and soil to create rich, black soil that can be fed back into the garden.
Tucked among waist-high daylilies there are pollinator gardens, straw bale benches, kid-sized picnic tables, a tiny pond, and a traditional hive-shaped horno oven for cooking tortillas and homemade pizzas. In a small fiberglass greenhouse, students grow the starts for their garden. There is even a hand-built beehive donated by retired Dolores resident Glen Noble, safely enclosed behind a tidy chain link fence.
Big on experimentation, School to Farm is working to establish effective growing practices using alternative techniques, including permaculture. In the Dolores School Garden, they are testing different types of planting beds. The Hugel Mound, named after a German horticulturalist, employs a kind of underground pyramid that layers stumps, branches, twigs, bark, and pine needles to create, in essence, a sponge that traps water deep enough to support perennial crops.
Contour beds at the school garden are designed to follow the slope of the hill on which they’re situated. The water is captured in the first bed until the bed is completely full, then it runs into the second and third beds, capturing water and minimizing runoff as it travels downhill.
The wicking bed has a bottom lined with a pond liner, then layered with rock, then weed guard, and finally soil. A newly-installed grey-water system uses a series of filtration tanks to trap water from the sinks that are used to wash the produce. The water travels through the rock, trapping sediment, and eventually drains into the soil of the bed, which wicks up moisture and delivers it to the plants--in this case, potatoes.
Throughout the garden are more traditional raised beds, each named for a Colorado peak or river, that sport a wide variety of crops, everything from amaranth to zucchini, peas to pumpkins, radishes to raspberries, as well as a host of herbs.
Classroom coordination is an integral piece of the School to Farm curriculum. Tallmadge explains: The fourth grade, for example, studies a lot of Colorado history which includes the study of ancestral Puebloan culture. A social studies unit on the importance of corn in the native ancestral diet might include an agricultural component on the history and development of corn, on seed saving, and on growing and grinding corn to make into tortillas. It’s an edible history lesson in real time.
Third-graders in Dolores learn about nutrition and food preparation as they plan their “restaurant” experience for the community. Besides helping to grow and harvest the featured menu items, students in each class choose a theme and design a menu, prepare a budget, and learn basic business practices. This past school year, students acted as cooks, hostesses, cashiers, and servers when they hosted a Spanish lunch, a French breakfast, and a carrot-based meal for the community as part of their annual fundraiser.
Later in the season, students host a plant sale for the community along with additional prepared items including dried herbs, meat rubs, and teas. Tallmadge plans to expand sales to include a wider array of homegrown and handmade products.
Homemade pizza with garden veggie toppings is a favorite lunch among the Dolores students as well as the AmeriCorps volunteers and School to Farm staff. It’s fast, fun, and versatile. Experiment with different toppings. The key is to use fresh ingredients, not too much sauce (or none at all) so that the crust doesn’t become soggy, and a judicious amount of cheese that allows the flavor of the vegetables to shine through. And because good news should be shared, here is the Dolores School Garden recipe for a delicious home-grown pizza.