Governator Funds School Gardens

Hopefully the word has gotten out that Ahhnold (with some great advice from Maria) has approved $15 million in funding directly to California School Gardens. This means from $2,500-$5,000 for YOUR school garden, if you are a California public or charter school.

The California School Garden Network is keeping us all up to date about how and when to apply:

Assembly Bill 1535 (Nuñez) (Chapter 437 of the Statutes of 2006) authorizes the California Department of Education (CDE) to award $15 million for grants to promote, create, and support California instructional school gardens. The grants will complement a school’s academic program and create opportunities for children to learn how to make healthier food choices, participate more successfully in their educational experiences, and develop a deeper appreciation of their community.

Check the CSGN website for all the details. You'll need to apply through your district or county office, so start now making those contacts and gathering a wish list of everything your garden needs. I'll be working with all our Urban Sprouts schools to apply as well. Feel free to contact Urban Sprouts for advice with your application!

school garden grant
school garden state funding

Food System News

Three pieces of news to report about our Food System: one local, one regional and one national.

Local first: Neighborhood Parks Council just released this Action Alert. A meeting today at San Francisco's City Hall will address this legislation:

Ross Mirkarimi, Supervisor for District 5, is introducing legislation to authorize Farmers' Markets to be located on Recreation and Park Department (RPD) property and for the Agricultural Commissioner to work with RPD to identify suitable sites for Farmers' Markets.

Public markets have provided an opportunity for communities to gather in their city centers worldwide for centuries. Our city parks frequently are the organic center of our neighborhoods. Dozens of examples from around the country wherein Parks and Recreation departments are playing leadership roles in helping farmers’ markets flourish are evident. San Francisco should be counted among those cities that support innovative approaches to using parks that also happen to be revenue generators that support recreation and parks.

NPC supports this ordinance with the understanding that a careful process of community engagement and consultation is carried out before any neighborhood or park improvement is made, and that a net benefit to the park occurs as a result.

Regionally, Om Organics put together this great web resource describing our Food System here in the Bay Area and the many organizations working to make it healthier for people and the environment.

Nationally, we should all start thinking about the US Farm Bill that will be voted on this year. A new book will be out in March entitled Food Fight: A Citizen's Guide to the Farm Bill by Daniel Imhoff and Roberto Carra. I'm hoping this resource will help prepare us to understand this legislation and make our voices heard. According to the book:

The Farm Bill is perhaps the single most significant land use legislation enacted in the United States, yet many citizens remain fairly unaware of its power or scope. With subsidies ballooning toward $25 billion per year, the Farm Bill largely dictates who grows what crops, on what acreage, and under what conditions — all with major impacts on the country’s rural economies, health and nutrition, national security, and biodiversity.

Keep an eye out for more ways to vote as a citizen and as a consumer for a healthier and more sustainable food system!

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farm bill

Worm Castings Ready to Go!

Here we are at Ida B Wells HS bagging up our fresh, ready to go worm castings! We started our worm bin in Mr. Pierce's class last spring, using a Wriggly Wranch Worm Bin. By October, the worms had filled one level of the worm bin with castings, so we added the next level on top and enticed them to move in by adding fresh (well, moldy, but new) food. Gradually they left behind their old home, and now we can separate out the last few stragglers (they run from the light and bunch together so they're easy to find).

We bagged up the castings into 1.5 pound bags. As soon as the students develop a product name and some instructions, we'll be making the castings available to neighbors, hopefully for sale at a neighborhood store.

We're keeping enough to give our own garden veggies a vitamin boost as well. If they can survive this chilly San Francisco cold snap! It's been freezing at night for the past several nights. We're hoping those greens can hold on!

worm bin
vermicompost

Colorful Cauliflower

Check out these beautiful and unique cauliflower varieties that are flourishing in the Ida B. Wells school garden. The top one is Romanescu, the other Purple. Cauliflower is in the Brassica family, where all the mustards and cabbages belong. What part of the plant do we eat from a cauliflower? It's an easy one—the flower, just before it opens!


cauliflower

Environmental Justice in California

I just heard on the radio about Invisible 5, an audio tour you take in your own car while driving down California's I-5 from San Francisco to LA. The tour describes environmental justice struggles being fought along the way:

Invisible-5 investigates the stories of people and communities fighting for environmental justice along the I-5 corridor, through oral histories, field recordings, found sound, recorded music, and archival audio documents. The project also traces natural, social, and economic histories along the route.

The first stop, in San Francisco, is the Bayview/Hunters' Point district where the city's power plant, a contaminated former Navy shipyard, a sewage treatment plant, superfund sites, many hazardous waste sites, as well as pollution from the highway corridor create the city's highest rates of cervical and breast cancer and asthma. These neighborhoods are home to a large number of Urban Sprouts students.

Visit the website and download the audio tour, and you can listen to it the next time you take the drive, all the way to LA or just back and forth across the Bay Bridge! Meanwhile I'll work on getting this into our Urban Sprouts curriculum.

environmental justice
interstate 5
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Big vs. Small Farms: who wins?

For the last unit of the Food! class at June Jordan we compared the economics behind large industrial farms and small organic farms in the US. Our project may not be completely scientific, but it was extremely interesting.

We compared USDA data for the average "large" US farm - definied as a farm with over $250,000 of income. The USDA says there are 151,000 large farms in the US - this makes up 7% of all the farms, but 59% of all farm production. That means a small number of big farms are growing most of our food.

Then, we called up a small organic family farm to see how they measured up. Small farms (income is less than $250,000) make up 90% of all US farms. But organic farms are less than 1% of all farms - there are only 8,000 certified organic farms in the US.

So, we compared the annual financial statement for a large farm and a small, organic farm. Here is what we found.

	Large Farm	Small Organic Farm
Total Income	$1.4 million	$76,800
Net Profit	$200,000	$32,000
Amount of Government direct payment	$95,000	$5,000
Profit Margin	14%	42%
% of Costs spent on Fertility	7% (fertilizers and pesticides)	3% (compost)
% of Costs spent on Labor	8%	26%

What do you think? Which is more productive?

Where would you rather raise a family? The small, organic farm is eating all its own food, and trading for other foods the family doesn't grow. The large farm eats less than 1% of its own food - most of what it produces is only good for animals to eat or to be processed.

Pictures of another small farm by Farmgirl of the wonderful Farmgirl Fare.

P.S. Read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma to learn more about industrial farm production and small-scale farming.

industrial farm
small-scale farm
organic farm

What's Ready in the Garden

It's that time . . . harvest time! We've been harvesting more than 6 kinds of greens like kale, collards, tatsoi, pac choi, mustard greens and chard. We're making delicious stir fry at several schools. There's excitement in the air!

Students are harvesting greens at Ida B Wells High School.

Squash is ready to eat . . .


The broccoli and fava beans are growing fast!


Check back to see our progress as we cook and eat all these tasty veggies!

Dear Friend of Urban Sprouts,

You may have read in the news that California’s unparalleled obesity crisis has become an epidemic. Poor nutrition and health are the second leading cause of death and disability.

You may have seen in your community that more and more children cope with adult health problems, like diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.

How can we allow this epidemic to touch our children? At the four San Francisco public schools where Urban Sprouts works, 50% of youth are overweight and 93% are considered unfit, according to state fitness standards. That is more than double the rate of overweight youth in the rest of San Francisco.

This astonishes me. Too many of the bright, opinionated and spunky youth I see every day at school are not getting the nutrition and daily exercise they need to grow strong and live long, healthy, and happy lives. And they are unfairly affected more than their peers from wealthier neighborhoods!

Everyday, in San Francisco, Urban Sprouts is helping urban youth to give their peers a different choice: fresh, healthy organic food grown right at their own schools. By nurturing living plants, harvesting and eating fresh fruits and vegetables, youth are nourishing their bodies and cultivating a commitment to healthy living.

This is why I’m urging you, right now, to click the “Donate Now” button above and make a donation of $35, $50, or $100. Your support for Urban Sprouts will make a meaningful difference.

By supporting Urban Sprouts, you’ll be providing school gardens where youth can connect deeply with peers, adults and the natural world, and eat veggies that taste of accomplishment and community, as well as good health.

Like me, you may notice the many teens who stop at mini marts on the way to school every morning and buy bags of neon red hot chips and super sized sweet drinks. Urban Sprouts seventh graders studied the nutrition facts on snacks and scooped the 25 teaspoons of sugar contained in one drink into a baggie to examine. We contemplated teenage depression and mood swings compounded by eating mass amounts of sugar.

Then, we went outside to the garden. The students dug their shovels into garden soil, using their strength to mix in nourishing compost, stopping only to admire graceful butterflies and wiggling worms. After 15 minutes we all stopped to take our pulses. Our hearts were beating at the recommended level for teens’ daily exercise. Whew! That felt amazingly good.

Urban Sprouts uses garden-based education to help urban youth make sense of the mixed messages they get from TV, parents, celebrities and peers about what to eat and why. When youth make educated choices about eating they have the power to resist media and marketing pressure and to live in a way that truly feels good.

I know you care about these issues as much as I do. That’s why I'm asking you for your help today. I want to offer you the chance to join the Urban Sprouts community yourself, as a donor and supporter.

Urban Sprouts was founded in 2003 by teachers from Luther Burbank Middle School and volunteers from the community who wanted to make a difference. Since then, over 450 youth have worked, played and explored in the garden. We’ve expanded to reach over 450 youth each year at four public schools: June Jordan School for Equity, Ida B. Wells Continuation High School, Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School, and the Small Middle School for Equity (formerly Burbank).

You’ll be interested to know that Urban Sprouts is uniquely designed to support urban middle and high schools serving disadvantaged youth. At Urban Sprouts schools, over 60% of youth are from low-income families and over 95% are youth of color.

These are the schools most in need of school gardens: in San Francisco, only 15% of school gardens serve middle or high school youth and 30% of school gardens belong to economically disadvantaged schools. That’s why our model is so crucial, for youth here and in other cities.

Urban Sprouts’ four areas of impact are:

❋ Health and Nutrition
❋ Ecoliteracy & Eco-Actions
❋ Academic Performance
❋ Youth Development

Urban Sprouts supports urban schools using a four-tiered approach:

❋ Garden-based science class: Over 450 students experience hands-on lessons in environmental science and nutrition, garden work, and cooking, led by our Garden Educators with teachers and volunteers.

❋ Research-tested curriculum: Results of our evaluation research already show that students recognize, prefer and choose to eat more vegetables after Urban Sprouts’ lessons. Our research partners are Tufts University and UC Berkeley.

❋ Family Connections: Urban Sprouts is piloting a new approach to low parent involvement in struggling urban middle schools. We’re using the school garden to engage families and help them improve the school through greening, healthy food, and more.

❋ A Model to help other urban middle and high schools: The results of our research will help other urban middle and high schools replicate our program.

After only three years, the response to Urban Sprouts is inspiring. School principals tell us the growing garden brings a sense of pride, beauty, and meaning to the gray and bleak urban setting of their schools. Teachers tell us the cooperation, leadership and self-confidence of students in the garden brings tears to their eyes. Students tell us they’ve started asking their parents to cook special family meals with garden fresh ingredients.

The community connections that grow from the garden are the most nourishing and meaningful results of all. We want you to join us! By giving to Urban Sprouts right now, you will make an investment in the healthy future of our youth and our communities, and you get to be a part of school gardens, today!

Please join us today! CLICK HERE to DONATE NOW and give your gift of $35, $50 or $100.



Thank you very much.

Warm wishes to you,

Abby R. Jaramillo

Executive Director
abby AT urbansprouts DOT org


P.S. We need you! In addition to your gift, we invite you to the garden, to mentor students during the day, help with garden building projects, or to serve on our board. EMAIL ME to get involved!

P.P.S. Our fiscal sponsor, Urban Resource Systems, Inc, accepts online gifts on our behalf. When you click the "Donate Now" button you'll see URS's name, but your gift will be designated for Urban Sprouts' programs. Thanks!