At Atwater Avenue Elementary on January 25th, we had a lesson on composting. We took a bag full of various “trash” pieces and sorted them into recycling, compost or landfill trash. We learned about what compost is, how to best make it from “brown” (the round part inside a toilet paper roll and brown paper towels) and “green” (produce food scraps, grass, leaves) and about what worms do in compost.
Miss Marisa, one of our teachers, brought her red wiggler worms from her compost, and they were quite the hit! Lots of squeals of delight made for a fun afternoon.
Before touching the worms, we made sweet potato fries! The students really enjoyed them and they are a much healthier option than normal fries. We learned that the orange in the sweet potatoes contain even more beta-carotene than carrots–which gets converted to vitamin A and is good for our eyes!
To make the sweet potato fries, we took potatoes sliced into sticks, and seasoned them with olive oil, salt, pepper, paprika and garlic powder, and let them roast in the oven at 400 for about 20 minutes. We also made a dipping sauce, with vegannaise (egg-less mayonnaise), lime, sriracha and honey. Yum!
The company Breville kindly donated one of their SmartOvens, which allows for a much larger variety for our cooking class portion. Thank you, Breville!
After school, we planted a few flowers into one of the empty beds, as we want to attract more bees, ladybugs and butterflies to the garden. The flowers were donated by Sunset Nursery and are a beautiful addition to the garden!
Kelly is a (somewhat ) recent graduate of UCLA in International Development, where she learned about agriculuture and food systems, and has since become passionate about awareness of and access to good, sustainable, local food. She recently started a food-centric blog she’s real excited about (shameless plug) found @ peacemeal.us. As a little kid, she never thought she’d grow up to be a vegetarian yogi who doesn’t own a tv or microwave, but c’est la vie.
