Ground-Breaking
Meg and I were at the Healthy City Youth Farm ground-breaking last week at Hunt Middle School. It was a collaborative effort of the Burlington School Food Project partners, dedicated to increasing local food access and awareness among our school-age children.
New Haven farmer Pat Palmer and his Percheron draft horses break ground at Hunt Middle School.
From the beginning, the scale of the initiative – to inaugurate a new school garden with a horse-drawn plough, taste-tests, and an interactive map of the ½-acre garden – was startling and wonderful to me. All 350 students were brought outside to the fields throughout the morning to participate in the activities.
When I was growing up, the only thing that interrupted our school day was your average fire drill or earthquake drill (and unexpectedly in 1989, an assembly to view some television coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall) - certainly nothing as exciting as horses, food, and games! It’s a measure of how far we’ve come with our commitment to healthy, locally grown foods that our national USDA now boasts a “People’s Garden” and our local middle school has embraced the idea that gardening, food, and learning are intertwined. To read more about the event, you can check out the Free Press story if you missed it.
There were beautiful moments with kids eagerly riding our bike-powered smoothie maker, but out of concern for the privacy of the students, I will not post them here. Instead, some shots of the beautiful Percheron horses, and the delicious “Popeye Poppers” (spinach balls) made with locally grown spinach by Bobby Young of Burlington Schools Food Service, and microgreens donated by Half-Pint Farm.
To learn more about Healthy City Youth Farm and the Burlington school gardens, now an iniative of Friends of Burlington Gardens, click here. There are opportunities to get involved over the summer as City Market member-workers. Ask how!
