by Gardener Suzanne

       Here were are coming to the end of winter once again and the beginning of spring.  As your children sing our ‘Circle of Seasons’ song, “Now it’s winter, then comes spring…” new life is just beginning to burst. The light is returning and our soil & outside temperature is warming.  Daffodils will be opening soon, trumpeting spring’s arrival.

       In the New Day gardens, we have begun our spring plantings with sowing peas in our drier soil beds, as well as arugula, radishes, broccoli raab, lettuce, carrots, and beets in our cloche beds.  Cloche being French for bell, describes the glass bell-shaped coverings that were placed over plants in early spring in the French countryside to warm the soil & seedlings. Today cloches are often made with clear plastic & wire hoops looking a bit like giant white caterpillars. They trap the sunlight in to warm the soil & tender seedlings, keeping the cool night temperatures and wind out. These cloches allow us to start some seeds even earlier than we could without such protection.

        We are still harvesting cooking greens (collards, kale, swiss chard & beet greens) as well as a beautiful, tender salad from our cold frames for the children’s lunches each week. In fact, I’ve dubbed raw collard green & kale leaves ‘New Day lollipops’ as your children love to eat these tender delicious greens raw. They are even sweeter after the frost we experienced in January. Fruits put by last summer and fall in our freezer are still nourishing us as they are added to our baking projects and snacks. This past week we have also been eating basil, tomatoes, and beans from last summer’s harvest.

        This season’s gardening classes are focused on starting seeds indoors, mason bees, and making ‘Kindness Cream’ for our school. The children are seeding cabbage, kale, lettuce, celery & flowers in newspaper pots made by the Skylark class. I like using these newspaper pots as the children have a great & meditative time making them, we are reusing a free resource, plus we can plant the whole pot in the ground & as the children will tell you, the worms will eat the newspaper nourishing the plant with their castings. The plants are then brought to grow under our grow lights in the Garden Room where already one can witness the baby peas, lettuce, herbs and flowers reaching for the light.

        The Mason bee, a solitary bee unlike the community-focused honey bee, is one of our native pollinators. They are some of our best fruit pollinators, but are only active from April until part of June. So they are our strong plum, apple, cherry, pear, and some strawberry & blueberry plant pollinators. We have mason bee homes at the school (not to worry, they are not prone to sting) & learn of their life cycle in our class.  

        All classrooms have already been medicine makers for our school creating calendula oil. This is simply calendula flowers from our garden soaking in olive oil. The olive oil is gathering the strong healing properties of the gentle calendula flowers, and after a whole moon cycle, we will strain this oil. Then we will simmer the strained oil with beeswax & vitamin E (as a preservative) to make our ‘Kindness Cream’.  On the playground, the children are invited to use our ‘Kindness Cream’ that we all made together, to aid in the healing process of scrapes & bruises. We find that after a combination of hugs, care and ‘Kindness Cream’ after a tumble or fall, spirits are lifted & the child is playing happily again.

        Gardener Sheri informed me that in my absence (I was visiting my family in Maine for a week) we had an intense downpour during which our swales, that many of you helped to create last December, were working well & keeping our play area dry.  Thank you again to all those families who helped with this grand project! Our next drainage project will be our pervious pavers play area, so get ready for more swale building. 

         A project we successfully experimented with last year was our Learning Garden. The raised spiral bed that many of you helped to create last spring outside the Stargarden doorway was a mixture of two classroom garden beds, perennial fruits, and food grown for Saint Francis Dining Hall. This year we have added two small raised beds so to create classroom garden beds for our four oldest classrooms. The children, led by their teachers, will take the knowledge they have learned from gardening classes to plant their classroom plots. I will be as involved, or non-involved, as each classroom would like in this process. This year we will also continue to grow a small section of food for the Saint Francis Dining Hall allowing the children to give of themselves to those who have less.

        I am sure you have noticed the beautiful woven fences that Gardener Sheri, the children, parents & I (although mostly Gardener Sheri) have been creating around the school’s land. Gardener Sheri was inspired by the fences at People’s Co-op and brought this beautiful idea to our school. Gardener Sheri is a wonderful artist & brings this quality to everything that she touches. Some of the children have been inspired by her creations & have been decorating the fences with evergreen needles they are finding on the ground. We are using prunings from our fruit trees for the weavings as a couple arborists (including our own Dad, Chad of Honl Tree Care) and I have been finishing up some winter pruning of our fruit trees. Also, Chad and other arborists have been bringing us more branches for weaving. (We receive our glorious wood chips from Honl Tree Care as well, thank you!)  Be looking for a new woven fence around the rain garden in the next month.

         New Day School has received for the second year, the city’s Native Plant Grant of $500.00 (last year it was $300) worth of natives from Bosky Dell Nursery in West Linn. This week, Gardener Sheri & I will bring the natives plants back from Bosky Dell, including salal, evergreen huckleberry, violet, and ocean spray to enhance our beautiful new sandbox as well as other places around our land.

        So get your peas, arugula, and radishes in the ground if your soil is workable (not too wet).  A great wetness test is to take a handful of soil, make it into a ball, and if this then easily crumbles apart, your soil is dry enough to plant in. If not, give it a little more time to dry out so not to harm the soil structure. Mix in some compost and soil amendments (my favorites are lime, greensand, kelp, organic alfalfa, rock phophate & glacial rock dust) & plant some seeds. Don’t worry if you haven’t begun planting yet, for you also have all of April to sow these spring plantings. You can also start planting turnips (Gilfeather and Purple Top are two great varieties), spinach, swiss chard and oriental greens.

         Thank you again to those of you who assist Gardener Sheri & myself daily at New Day, as it takes many hands to create and sustain a garden.  Thank you to everyone for your support and care for the gardening program. May we all continue to grow with and be inspired by our gardens.

Click the image to read the Fall 2011 Orange Mail

It’s painting day for the Sunsong children.

One day each week the children experience watercolor painting, using a wet on wet technique.

Lanterns for Lantern Walk

October’s ethical value is Inner Light

The children are busy making lanterns for Lantern Walk and learning the songs for the program, to celebrate their inner light, during this time of dwindling outer light.

My Lantern

My lantern, my lantern

Shining near and far

Shining like the sun

Shining like the moon

Shining like a silver star

DIIPAVALII SHAJAYECHI PROBHU
TOMARE KORITE BORON 2

ESHO TUMI HRIDI MAJHE,
NITI NITI NOBO SHAJE
DHIIRE DHIIRE PHELIYA CHORON

DIIPAVALII SHAJAYECHI PROBHU
TOMARE KORITE BORON 2

ESHO TUMI MONO MAJHE,
ARO GANE ARO NACHE
MRIDU HASHI KORI BIKIRON

DIIPAVALII SHAJAYECHI PROBHU
TOMARE KORITE BORON 2

ESHO TUMI BHABA LOKE,
CHONDE O NOBAALOKE
JAGAYE MOHON SPONDAN

DIIPAVALII SHAJAYECHI PROBHU
TOMARE KORITE BORON 2

I have decorated my house with the festival of light, for the divine peace   Come into my heart with new adoration every time,
spreading the feet slowly.

Come into my mind, my songs and dances, radiating sweet smile.  Come into my realm of ideas, with new rhythm and light, creating enchanting vibrations.

The lessons in the book include the importance of tolerance, acceptance, openness,understanding, and sharing, and how, “The smallest things can pull us apart–until we learn that friendship is far more powerful than difference.”

The children just loved the beautiful illustrations, by Tricia Tusa.

With love,
Munsel

The Skylarks easily organized themselves into a bread-buttering, jam-spreading juggernaut, and plowed through the long list of ‘restaurant orders’ taken from the younger children. Cooperation, patience, and memory were all shown to effect.

And many games were introduced after play time, the nature of which the Skylarks were much better suited to figuring out. Yet still they played cooperatively, with little more than a nod to their fellow Skylark as the games progressed. On the last day, the Waterlilies were excited to carry flowers with them to All-School-Circle, so they could put them in a vase and leave them for the Skylark class to enjoy.