The shift from late fall into early winter is a time for rest and reflection. As my schedule winds down and I integrate the lessons of the season, I feel deep gratitude for my children, students, colleagues, community, and the SOLA garden I am so honored to tend. Our harvest is complete. Next season’s garlic has been planted. Our horn manure is underground. Pollinators are taking rest in stems and fallen leaves. Wildlife prepares to overwinter in nearby brush. Our paths are weeded and covered in wood chips. Our garden beds have been cleared and blanketed with straw.
We sense a quieting and stillness, but know the soil beneath us is busy with life. Our accomplishments are abundant: months of flowers for bees and butterflies and also for vases and altars, boxes of garlic, tasty watermelons, pumpkins for every classroom, jars of hot sauce soon to be bottled, and bellies full of bean soup. Sometimes it is easiest to notice and celebrate the outcomes. As I reflect, I recall the moments of our process when students demonstrated awareness, empathy, and cooperation, regardless of a result.
Despite the fact that it has been happening for thousands of years, it is no simple thing for a community to grow food, prepare it, and eat it together. The process involves varied elements and forces and requires the miraculous merger of many parts: viable seed, fertile soil, cooperative climate, predicable rainfall, obliging insects, auspicious timing, attentive and collaborative humans, and, in the case of a school garden, caring and willing children. This last part is what most marvels me and guides my work. Of all that we are cultivating together, I am ultimately interested in nurturing my students’ connection to the garden, and by extension, their sense of belonging to the natural world.
As we close a very successful season, I celebrate my students growing capacity to care and connect. They are capable of living harmoniously, within a web of relations. Individually, every one of them, inspires hope. Collectively, they are truly a positive force, in my life and also in the world. Our garden is a place where, once a week, students come and go. Every time, it is my aim and my wish, that they return with wonder, and walk away with lasting experience and an enlivened sense of connection to the earth.
Written By: Dana Kristal, Farmways Teacher & Living Arts Steward