From Garden to Table

Did you know that Food Miles are the distance your food has traveled since it was created until it reaches your shopping cart as a consumer? The longer the distance your food traveled to get to your plate, the greater harm to the environment, the more chances the farmer is losing out on profits and money is going to manufacturers, and the more likely it is that chemicals and other harmful substances were used to prepare the goods for long bouts of travel. It is beyond amazing to think of the sheer accessibility of food we have today as we browse through the supermarket. We have access to exotic goods including fresh figs, avocados, mangoes, dragon fruit and just to name a few. Enjoying the benefits of world trade should not certainly cause you shame, as buying these goods is simply enjoying the benefits of living in today's world. However, when possible, buy Fair Trade so that the the profits are at least reaching the farmers and those who actually go through the physical labour of growing, caring for and harvesting your produce. Reliance on this food poses serious threats to our sustainability as a city and greater country, and forces farmers to use alternative and unsafe methods of food production to ensure travel and shelf life. Buying locally produced goods and/or growing your own food will help to reduce your food miles significantly. Check out this great book from the Calgary Public Library entitled 'How did that get in my Lunchbox?" by Lucia Gaggoti about the story of how food travels from farm to table.

Many people think that growing your own food in Calgary is too challenging, not possible or not worth it considering the short growing season as compared to other warmer and more tropical climates around the world. Today, there are over 100 community gardens present in Calgary and the participants prove the breadth, quality and variety of produce that can be grown quite easily in our climate. This Saturday, August 9th at Kids Grow, we were very fortunate to have Poppy Innovations come out to facilitate workshops at both garden locations on nourishment from edible greens from the garden. Both adults and children were surprised to hear about some of the edible greens in the garden that are commonly thrown out. Did you know that you can consume beet, radish and carrot leaves? We've heard that they are all great in salads, beet leaves can be especially tasty in a casserole and carrot leaves make a mean pesto!



After an information session on the health benefits of consuming these commonly grown greens, we harvested some of our garden plot to make a delicious garden salad together. Ingredients included swiss chard, kale, beet leaves, spinach, sweet peas and raspberries. We then prepared a hearty vinaigrette made from red wine vinegar, olive oil and a sprinkle of salt and pepper to dress our salad. After consuming our delicious treat, we made individual tea sachets full of freshly grown mint, coriander and raspberries to add to water for an alternative to sugary drink mixes we often consume during the summertime. We sincerely thank Sharon and Karyn from Poppy Innovations for coming out and spending the day with Kids Grow!

Poppy Innovations is hosting a 'Healthy Selfie' campaign. Take a selfie of you or your family engaging in a healthy activity such as gardening, eating healthful food or exercising and share it on their Facebook page. If your picture gets the most likes, you could win a FujiFilm Instax Mini 8 Instant Camera! Poppy Innovations also offers cooking classes for families starting in the Fall. For more information about the organization, please visit their website here.

It's time for a scavenger hunt!

Upon visiting the garden this week, we noticed that our garden beds were covered in a luscious forest of greenery. After weeks of hot and dry weather, lots of garden maintenance was required in order to ensure the ultimate well-being of our beloved Kids Grow garden plot. We started with some pruning of our spinach as they had all gone to flower. Did you know that spinach plants are more likely to bolt in hot weather? It is a self defence mechanism to make sure that if all the leaves dry up, the flowers will produce enough pollen to grow a new plant if necessary. If we let the plants go to flower, all of the plant's energy goes into producing the flowers and in turn, the leaves grow small and taste quite bitter. We snipped off the flowers to make sure all of the plant's energy is making it's way to the producing large, dark green and tasty leaves. The kids took turns to water the garden and also lent a helping hand by watering any of the plots in the community garden that belonged to vacationers or those unable to come out to the garden and water on a regular basis. After all, it is a community garden and we want to make sure we can do everything we can to help out our fellow community garden members! One of our garden plots at Silver Springs is home to an emerging pumpkin patch. We lovingly watered these plants with great care as to be careful not to get too much water on the leaves. It water sits on the leaves in the hot sun, they can be singed and in very wet conditions, mould has a more suitable environment to grow. 

Following our gardening segment, we decided to read a story, in fact a guessing game, about plant identification! This was in preparation for our scavenger hunt in which the children and their families were asked to search the garden for various greens, veggies, flowers and berries! For some extra excitement, we also asked the kids to retrieve scattered puzzle pieces around the garden/orchard to build our mystery puzzle in conclusion of the day's adventure. A lot about plant growth was learned at this event, especially when our participants had trouble finding potatoes and beets in the garden! We also asked families to find some fun artifacts such as a crazy hamster (picture found below), a ken doll doing the splits and a pig wearing earrings. The kids searched high and low, far and near for all of the items on the list and were able to find almost everything. We also had them on a hunt for nature's creatures; a worm, a beetle and an ant. We had to pur our thinking caps on to find these creatures, as they aren't always visible to us wherever we look. After checking under rocks for beetles, digging in the ground for worms and peeking into cracks on the sidewalk for ants, we were successful in finding all the items on our list!

Since we've had some picky eaters at Kids Grow, especially in the department of vegetables, one of our awesome team members created rainbow cards for each child that pose the following question: Can you taste the colours of the rainbow this summer? The purpose of these cards is to encourage trying new vegetables in the garden and embracing new looks, flavours and textures. This week, we shared a snack of mini cucumbers and French Breakfast radishes. At Sunnyside, the kids were able to add fresh raspberries from the communal plot to the our snack and at Silver Springs, we were lucky to try some new varieties of berries and delicious, mouth-watering snap peas.  Our day ended some exciting games of 'Fruit Salad' and 'Capture the Crops' and of course our weekly sharing circle to share our favourite part of the day!

You don't have to be an plant expert or hiking enthusiast to take a nature walk. Go on a hunt outdoors, spend some time in the sun and make time to appreciate the wonderful creations of nature that surround you. 

Story Telling in the Garden

This week the Calgary Public Library visited us at the garden! At Hillhurst-Sunnyside Larissa Johnston from the Louise Riley branch came and read us lots of fun books. We learned about how friends can help us when we're scared. We also read a book where vegetables were made into cars, planes, skis and much more.

We took a break with our snack of apples and mangos (which were a bit hit!). After our snack we created our own stories. We passed around pictures that could inspire our stories - like Jo the Ladybug and Sally the Chickadee. After we made up stories of our own we worked together to create a story together! Each person would take a turn adding a sentence or two to the story. 

That was a lot of sitting down so we played some tag to get up and running. We played octopus tag - where we had to join arms and run together to catch everyone. We also played tree tag where whoever is tagged freezes and can only be unfrozen if their friend helps them. All of these activities helped us realize that we are most successful when we work together and have our friends or family to help us. 

Over at Silver Springs Edible Garden Courtney Novotny joined us from the Crowfoot library. We read some more stories and sang a song about peas in a pod. We also had time to draw what we found in our garden. Our chard, kale, potatoes, pumpkins and peas are growing really well! We even tried some of the kale and peas (in addition to our snack of apples and mango).

We wanted to run around a bit after that so we played Tree Tag and a variation of it called Banana Tag (in this game it takes two people to unfreeze frozen individuals). All that running tired us out so we played Tangled Tree Roots. In this game we all stood in a circle and held hands with someone who wasn't standing next to us. This meant we were all tangled and we needed to work together to untangle ourselves! Again, this showed us that we can achieve more when we work together. 

Don't worry if you missed our activities this week - you can always come next week. 

Hillhurst Sunnyside Community Garden/ Orchard
10am-12pm
OR
Silver Springs Edible Garden
2pm-4pm

What to Bring: Water, sunscreen and your enthusiasm for gardening!

Berry-Painting and a little bit of Yoga

We had two activities through which the kids were able to channel their talents today! Both were intimately tied to the nature we are a part of and cannot do without and served as a reminder as to how important it is for us to be conscious of this relation!

Firstly, some art, and for a change, instead of using another chemical-based tube-stored paint, we opted to create our own - using berries!

Mushing together some raspberries, we were able to obtain a nice bright red, while a little more counter-intuitively, blueberries gave us a deeper red with a heavier tone. A modest palette but enough to splatter around the page to interesting effect. The 'paint' also had a nice consistency to it which allowed us to stick pieces of bark and other plant material to our page to create a nice collage of sorts.

Naturally, as often happens in any great artistic endeavor, the journey can get a little messy, and there was definitely a little bit of running back and forth to the tap to wash our hands but in the end, a common theme in the sharing circle was that the kids definitely enjoyed their little moment of expressing themselves through the medium of fruit-mush-on-paper!

My personal favorite  of the day though was a little bit of improvisational yoga in the garden! In the absence of a proper yoga-teacher, we decided to use a little gem of a book called the yoga game to see if we could solve a riddle given to us and then interpreting the response in a yoga pose! We had the tree (vrksasana), the cat (svanasana, marjariasana, bitilasana... all combined into the one animal!), and also the cobra (bhujangasana)! A little revelation for me was that I could pull off the headstand after-all (at our Silver Springs location with a little help from a friend :) ). Again, a great day to be out among the green with the only unexpected weather outcome being a little grass-shower from all the kids at the end of the Sunnyside session - awesome!

"The Cobra" - could you tell?

Crouching tiger...resetting before another star jump!

To the dust all shall return!

The theme for the day was composting and naturally we had quite a few composting-related activities that occupied us this week!

At the Sunnyside location, we began by inspecting our plot and making sure our crops were healthy and green. We spent a good portion of our time ensuring we didn’t have too many weeds competing with our plantation, and with the occasion, I also got a chance to finally learn all the different greens we had growing. Calgary’s been rather dry and warm these past few weeks so we made sure we generously watered our plot as well.

For the activities, we began first of all by learning the essentials of composting by reading through this beautiful picture book and then to test our knowledge we played compost-or-not classifying game. But first, we had to go on a little treasure hunt to find all the ‘item-cards’ listing some things we could find in our garden before deciding if we’d throw them into our compost bin. Naturally, when things are hidden, sometimes they stay a little too well hidden so we were faced with a frantic all-hands-on-deck period when we all tried to hunt down the final card, but luckily they were all found in the end!

We had some obvious ones such as apple cores and other organic food items which are, of course, definitely compostable. We also had not-so-obvious ones such as t-shirts and clothing items of which only the cotton bits or other organic fibres are compostable.

Finally, we had a chance to make our own little compost starter cups which we made by first grabbing a scoop of the ready to use compost from the garden – the ‘brown’. Our snack for the day was everyone’s favourite fruit – bananas! – so we were able to use the chopped-up peels as the ‘green’. The trick to getting the compost going is to layer the greens and the browns and making sure to keep the mixture nice and moist with a nice sponge-cake-like consistency. My apologies if the next time you go to enjoy your sponge-cake with some tea, you are reminded of a garden compost, although, that’s not altogether a bad result either if it gets us maintaining our own composts at home :)

These activities we were able to replicate pretty smoothly over at over Silver Springs location, but with the added bonus that we had time for some games at the end – nothing rounds out a nice, warm afternoon better than a few rounds of ‘what-time-is-it-Mr/Ms/Mrs/Queen/King-Wolf’!

Can you hear what I hear?

Birds seem to be abundant in the city of Calgary but we tend to overlook and become oblivious towards the common group of pigeons that hover over a green field in the summer or the crow that caws at you on your daily commute to work. What role do these birds play in our community, the greater ecosystem and more specifically our garden?

These are a few of the questions we began to explore at our Kids Grow event on Saturday, July 5th. We began by familiarizing ourselves with the common birds of Calgary. Many people are familiar with the Mallards and Geese that inhabit the surrounding bodies of water and the crows and pigeons that socialize in public areas but how much do we know about the starlings and sparrows? After our information session conducted through a fun game of matching bird pictures with their corresponding facts and bird calls, we took a nature walk to see what birds we could find. Our hearing skills were surely heightened on this adventure as we had to find the proprietors of each distinct sound amongst the harmonious bird chatter.

After our nature walk, we headed back to the garden to make some bird feeders. Many varieties of bird seed that can be bought at your local grocery stores contain preservatives and other not-so-nice things that can harm our wildlife. We decided to make our own using goodies that are safe for birds and completely edible for humans. Another problem highlighted with bird feeders is the sheer dependence birds can develop to an man-made source of food. The bigger your bird feeder and the more you refill it, the greater the chances are that birds in your area will keep coming back for more and develop a reliance on your goods. Ensure that your feeder is small and contains a variety of seeds and dried fruits that can be supplementary to their diet and not fully meet their dietary requirements. We made bird feeders out of orange peels! Click here for the instructions.

Succeeding our bird feeder construction were some fun bird-themed games! We began with the 'Duck Waddle' and finished with 'The Little Lost Birdie' in which parents and children paired up, one as the mama bird and one as the blindfolded baby bird. The mama bird would announce her specific bird call to the baby and the little birdie would have to use her listening skills to find her mama bird!

To learn more about birds in Calgary, check out the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary. The walking trails are unfortunately closed due to the flood damage from last year but they continue to offer information through their nature and free tours to those interested.

From Seed To Fruit

The forecasts had been ominous but in the end, Calgary was able to offer us another fine day to spend outside, and what better way to enjoy it than working the land again!

Looking for ladybugs!

Today’s activities centred on exploring the plant life cycle. After some very productive work de-weeding the orchard, the kids at the Sunnyside location were also quite adept at piecing together the whole narrative from the seed to the plant which flowers before finally bearing the fruit containing the seeds to start it all over again. It’s definitely a process that we overlook too often, yet it never ceases to amaze us when we contemplate how all the potentialities of a plant are contained in the seed – life’s original ‘miracle,’ that sustains all other life on this planet!

We also read a little story together that visualized this idea beautifully by illustrating the diversity of flowers and fruits carried on this Earth (who doesn’t love children’s books?!) and the kids were definitely recognizing a lot more of the plants than I was! Naturally, we finished off with a little game, this time we played magic plants. Again, I portrayed the poor farmer who has to ward away trespassers on his field who evade his attentions by ‘freezing’ into plants just when he turns around… a wonderful way to round off the fun!

Over to the Silver Springs garden, and from the close-knit village-feel of Sunnyside, we found ourselves in the wide expanses, and swooping mountain vistas of the north-western part of the city. Our plants were definitely sprouting and garden had itself a newly-crafted seating area as well. The kids harnessed their artistic talents in composing some really creative pictures that incorporated actual plant-material with colourful additions of their own which all melded nicely together on the page, I have to say! Check out this great composition from Lucian!