Edible San Francisco

Photos By Bart Nagel

Edible gardens in San Francisco’s schools teach kids to embrace nature—and their leafy greens

Dropped in the middle of this annual Country Fair, you’d probably think you were in the country. A few sheep stand about nakedly, their wool having just been shorn, gathered, and brought indoors to be washed and prepped. Some chickens are busily pecking in their nook of the garden. There’s a bustling bake sale over by the farm stand, which is stocked with berries, greens, bouquets of flowers, and homemade lemon marmalade. The barbecue is cranking out grass-fed burgers and sausages and wafting a delightful scent through the air. A lively bluegrass band plays loudly under a tent. Despite the gray, drizzly day, people keep pouring in.

However, this bucolic scene is taking place on the corner of Dolores and 16th Streets, in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District—an area much better known for its historic churches, hipster boutiques, taquerias, and coffee houses than for its resident farm and garden schoolyard. The fair is the culmination of the Environmental Education Program of Children’s Day School, a private, co-educational school for pre-kindergarteners through eighth graders founded in 1983. Its school garden, begun in 1995, is the oldest San Francisco school garden; it’s also the only one with livestock.

CDS is part of a growing and thriving “green schoolyard” movement that seeks to connect urban kids with nature. Several of San Francisco’s public elementary schools—through the financial support of Proposition A’s “School Modernization Bonds,” PTA fundraising, and the networking assistance of the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance—are joining CDS in building and maintaining sophisticated food gardens that not only serve as supplementary outdoor classrooms, but give city kids the much-needed opportunity to get their hands dirty by growing their own food.

The school garden movement is gaining momentum, helped by the notoriety of Alice Waters’s Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley as well as the buzz around sustainable food in general. It’s also being pushed along by the growing body of evidence documenting what many researchers see as an increasing, and harmful, divide between children and the natural world. With less access to open space and more time spent indoors in front of various electronic screens, many children are experiencing “nature deficit disorder,” as Richard Louv calls it in his influential book, Last Child in the Woods. The phrase is not meant to be diagnostic in a clinical sense: Louv uses it to describe “the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses.”

Like most Americans, children have become increasingly detached from their food as a product of nature. As marketers have capitalized on the incredible consumer power of children, food especially has been tailor made in the lab or factory and marketed to suit the assumed tastes and preferences of a younger audience. So-called “kids’ food”—the nuggets, Go-Gurt, and sweetened juice boxes—has compounded the distancing of children from the natural world.

“The importance of seeing where food comes from cannot be overstated,” says Rachel Pringle, programs manager of the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance (SFGSA). “When kindergarteners pull a carrot out of the ground for the first time, they just look aghast.” But with a little help, minutes later they’re enthusiastically chomping on that same carrot.

Above: Children’s Day School sheep, Lucky and JoJo, snack on fresh hay outside the barn.

Teacher’s pets

At Children’s Day School, the kids get an intimate understanding of where food comes from along with a generous helping of the joys of eating fresh food.

CDS’s farm animals—its sheep Lucky and JoJo, and the chickens Ginger, Super Fluffy, Pom Pom, and Moonlight— serve as unofficial mascots for the school’s approach to education, one that encourages and teaches eco-literacy as part of its mission to provide a hands-on and engaging curriculum. (Full disclosure: my daughter starts first grade at CDS in the fall.) Its year-long Environmental Education Program seeks to cultivate the kids’ empathy for animals and plants, to develop their sense of environmental stewardship, and explore academic topics within a real-life context.

All of CDS’s preschool through fourth-grade students participate in the program and spend one hour a week in the garden with Misty Cummings, the Environmental Education Resource teacher. Together, they till the soil, plant seeds, search for snails, harvest crops, conduct science experiments, collect eggs, muck out the barn, and turn over the compost with child-sized pitchforks.

Aimee Giles, CDS’s first garden coordinator and now the school’s Admissions Director, describes the foundation that they are trying to lay: “When the kids are out there looking for worms or bugs, or planting and harvesting, they’re making connections that in middle school they can build on and take action around, which will make them citizens. We are planting those seeds.”

Meaty matters

Similar seeds are being sown in a number of schools all throughout San Francisco. The day that I visited Commodore Sloat Elementary, Garden Coordinator Christine Leishman was leading an in-class lesson with third graders that included an impromptu discussion of where waffles come from. (One of the students earnestly suggested that waffles grew in the garden.) Leishman taught a brilliant lesson that included a breakdown of the whole-food ingredients that waffles are composed of, the plants from whence these ingredients come, and a discussion about the nutritional components of a waffle—its fats, carbohydrates and proteins.

The gardens are cultivating an awareness of food systems and nudging kids toward the realizations that strawberries don’t just magically come from Safeway and that waffles don’t grow in the garden. They are also encouraging them to add a wider variety of fruit and veggies into their diets. But on top of this, the school gardens are also helping to dispel a few myths about children: namely, that kids and (naturally) green foods don’t mix.

“When it comes to eating the food that we grow, at least 90 percent of them are completely gung-ho about whatever we’re making,” says CDS’s Cummings. “Their whole attitude about it is open and positive. Usually a few of them are nervous but excited, and so they dive in.”

She recounts a moment when she watched a preschooler suddenly realize that the plants in the garden were food. A little boy walked right up to one of the small heads of broccoli and helped himself to a big bite right off the stalk. “There was this amazing realization that ‘Oh, you eat this!’” she recalls with a smile.

CDS’s animals inspire some interesting discussions. “It’s usually one of the preschoolers or kindergarteners who, when we’re out there with the chickens, will suddenly get a really serious look on their face and say, ‘Are we going to eat these chickens?’” Cummings says. “You can tell that they’re putting it together, that this is a chicken and that we eat chickens, then wondering, Do we eat these chickens? Aren’t these chickens like our pets?” (The answer is no, CDS doesn’t eat their chickens, but the school does use the eggs in baking projects.)

And lately, conversations around sex and gender have been taking place with some of the older students because one of the four chickens, Ginger, who was born female and used to lay eggs, is now becoming more rooster-like—growing spurs and a comb.

Chard at work

On a beautiful sunny day in the Marina District, garden coordinator Linda Myers is standing in the edible corner of the year-and-a-half-old garden belonging to Sherman Elementary School (public, kindergarten through fifth grade). She is surrounded by tall stalking lettuces, some that have gone to seed (a purposeful lesson in the seed-to-seed lifecycle of the garden), raised beds spilling over with red Russian kale, bok choy, Swiss chard, Bordeaux spinach, a wide variety of lettuces, mustard greens sporting clusters of beautiful (and spicy!) tiny yellow flowers, and huge heads of purple cabbage, wrapped in delicately veined outer leaves. A lush, jumble of leafy color, the garden also boasts a butterfly area and a water garden with a waterfall.

Myers raises her voice above the traffic that is whizzing by on Franklin Street, to greet a class of third graders who spend 45 minutes every other week in the garden. The kids come bounding out, full of kinetic energy as bustling and buzzing as the traffic. After greeting them, she immediately begins testing their awareness of and knowledge about the lush vegetation that surrounds them: “Everybody, repeat after me: “Artichoke.” The kids respond in an eager chorus, “Artichoke!”

Myers encourages them to get in close and feel the plant, then asks them if they can tell her what family the artichoke belongs to. “Asparagus” is a good guess, but Myers reminds them that the answer is the thistle family. They walk through the beds and identify the various edibles, then study the rich colors and delicate veining of the purple cabbages’ outer leaves. “Turn your hand over and look at the veins in your hands, now see the veins in the leaf,” Myers instructs them. “That’s how the water and nutrients travel through the plant, just like the veins in your body.”

The kids are into it, enthusiastically acknowledging the various plants and listening as Myers ranges from cross-pollination to organic pest control. When it is time to harvest the lettuce, the kids busily set to work and their energy level quiets to a concentrated hush.

While the greens are being washed, and the kids have a moment for some unstructured playtime in the garden, their third-grade teacher, Marsha Lew, explains to me, “These kids are much more aware of their natural surroundings than other kids I’ve worked with in the past, because of the garden.” She adds, “You can talk about nature all you want, or bring it into the classroom, but it’s confined. When the kids are outside and it’s all around them, it’s a completely different feel, and they really begin to get it.”

The garden has become a great way to encourage the imaginative play of the kids, Lew says. As we stand there and chat by the waterfall, some kids are playing a game by the butterfly garden, while others are draped over big boulders that ring the waterfall and pool, either talking intently to each other or else just sitting by themselves, daydreaming, listening to the sound of the bubbling water. Another myth—that kids don’t need quiet time to reflect, meditate, and just be still—is dispelled.

When the salad is brought out, the kids enthusiastically dig in. The salad is the end-of-the-day snack that they share together right before they get on the bus and head home. Honestly, I’ve never seen kids so excited about salad. OK, so there is organic ranch dressing on it, but still. A third-grader named Wilson sums everything up, when asked what his favorite part about the garden is, he answers: “The eating part!”

The Garden Gang

Dozens of San Francisco schools now incorporate some sort of green on their blacktops. The San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance (www. sfgreenschools.org) helps these schools connect to the resources they need to start and maintain a school garden. Here’s a sample of those with established garden projects:

Alice Fong Yu Alternative School
Large garden with raised beds, native plantings, pond with solar powered pump

Cesar Chavez Elementary School
Raised beds in front of school, murals, edible garden

Children’s Day School
Mini-farm & garden with barnyard (chickens and sheep), herbs, murals, native plants, fruit trees, cob benches

Commodore Sloat Elementary School
Edible garden, bird & butterfly garden, native plants, artwork, green house, compost, master plan

James Denman Middle School
Large edible garden, bird and butterfly plants, garden art, water feature

John Muir Elementary School
Edible garden (at nearby Koshland Park), container plantings, native garden, and worm bins

Lakeshore Alternative School
Edible garden, artwork, native plantings, greenhouse, raised beds, and flowers

Rooftop School
Large established garden with raised beds, edible garden, shade structure, greenhouse

San Francisco Community School
Edible garden, native plantings, fruit trees, cob oven, greenhouse, artwork

Sherman Elementary School
Fruit trees, in-ground garden, container gardens, native plantings, waterfall and pond, solar panel

Ulloa Elementary School
Large outdoor classroom, native plantings, dry creek bed, raised-bed edible garden

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