Friends Academy

n/a

Address: 1088 Tucker Rd.
Dartmouth, MA 02747
US

Telephone: (508)999-1356
Fax: (508)997-0117
Email: radleyandfinch@earthlink.net
Website: http://www.friendsacademy1810.org

The garden at Friends Academy was initiated in 2007 by faculty member Katherine Gaudet as a tribute to her parents, Jim and Emmie Roberts, who were both avid gardeners. The school garden has its roots in their memory.

From the start the garden was conceived as a place for children to learn about gardening in a hands-on way and to understand the nutritional and environmental consequences of food production. Students read soil tests, prepare compost, sow cover crops, set up protective row covers, and seed and/or transplant at least two different crops per bed during the outdoor growing season, which begins in March and ends sometime around Thanksgiving.

During the 2008-2009 school year the garden doubled its original size and now consists of ten growing beds, each a meter wide and fifty feet long. The garden measures 3630 sq. feet, or one-twelfth of an acre. Thanks to a generous grant from the Baldwin Foundation, this year the garden gained a storage shed and an irrigation system plus an array of tools and other gardening necessities.

Special thanks also go out to our neighbor on Tucker Rd., Derek Christianson, who is the owner of Brix Bounty Farm and coordinator of Roots Down - New Bedford and Know Your Vegetables (http://brixbounty.blogspot.com). Derek has been an invaluable source of advice, equipment and materials. Every school garden should be so lucky to have such a generous and knowledgeable mentor.

The school garden follows the bio-intensive method of gardening, which advocates for the use of organic fertilizers -- primarily compost -- and which uses a strategy of close planting in defined beds. The leaves of mature plants touch their neighbors, producing a living mulch that blocks sunlight and minimizes weed growth. Close planting also maximizes garden space, and because plants are situated only in established beds, applications of compost and fertilizer are more efficiently targeted.

In addition to educating children about gardening, the garden has been a key piece of the Friends Academy service-learning program. Every Friday beginning in early April and continuing throughout the summer, volunteers drive garden produce three miles to the Food Pantry at Grace Episcopal Church in New Bedford. The food pantry serves more than 200 households, a number that has been on the increase since the beginning of the now year-long economic downturn.

We have more than two dozen different crops in production and on October 9, 2009, we surpassed the 2000 pound benchmark. (For the Standard Times article see: http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091016/EDU02/910169985/-1/EDU)

Our most productive crops have been cucumbers, 313 pounds; lettuce, 366 pounds; Portuguese kale, 319 pounds; summer squash 223 pounds; potatoes, 222 pounds and cabbage 205 pounds. We hope to improve those numbers in the coming season.

In mid-September and early October, students seeded hundreds of Hakurei turnips and a similar number of radishes. They started spinach and purple turnips in flats, which will winter-over and if all goes well will be harvested in late April and early May 2010. Students also transplanted hundreds of lettuce seedlings, which we intended to harvest sometime around Thanksgiving.

Through the fall we harvested Portuguese kale, collards, lettuce, carrots, broccoli, cabbage and pumpkins. Once the colder weather set, we harvested curly green kale, whose flavor is much improved following a hard frost. We also had under row covers a small patch of late-seeded potatoes that we hoped would persevere through the chilly weather and and be ready for the holidays, and they did -- 26 pounds worth. In anticipation of frosts and freezes the more delicate fall crops also spent the night under row covers.

Our recent Thanksgiving harvest was the most productive of the fall season. Sixth graders harvested more than 200 pounds of fall crops. Cabbage led the way at 86 pounds followed by the 26 pounds of potatoes. The unseasonably warm month of November allowed most crops to hang on longer than expected. The brassicas, lettuce, carrots, turnips and radishes demonstrated surprising growth, albeit much slower than during the prime growing months. Row covers extend the season, and November temperatures averaging in the mid-fities were also a plus.

The school begins its winter break on December 18th and will close for two weeks. That date will surely spell the end of the growing season because despite the debatable advantages that climate change offers to gardeners, the early winter nights will most likely attack with at least one hard freeze, shutting the door to an unseasonably warm year's end. With that in mind, students completed the final harvest of the 2009 season on December 11th. Sixth-eight pounds of produce, mostly hardy greens like Swiss chard, kale and lettuce were sent to the Food pantry, lifting the yearly total to 2624 pounds.

The Food Pantry currently serves 243 households consisting of 657 individuals. A ton and a quarter of produce might seem like a lot, but given the increasing number of families asking for assistance, there's a need for much more. That need plus our enchantment with the miracles wrought by soil and seeds are what will inspire us to improve the quantity and quality of our vegetables.

Steve Walach