October 2025: Farming and Earth Education
Warm Greetings,
The cold has arrived! Our vegetable garden is holding onto our last carrots and radishes for the season. We have spinach and cilantro and a busily blossoming dye flower garden to tend. Our vegetable garden will overwinter with covercrops, straw, and cardboard. Students enjoy letting the goats into the garden gate to “mow down” the weeds for us. While the garden overwinters, the Second/Third Grade class, our resident Farming class each year, will have more time for small building projects. We will start using hammers and nails to construct birdhouses sized to cater to our local native birds.
The rainy week was declared by many Second/Third Grade students to be THE BEST! The animals still need care on wet days, so we bundle up in our rain gear to get things done as usual. We had time to play too! The garden beds didn’t need any water, so after the animals were taken care of, we were able to evaluate some erosion issues that the rainy days revealed. Third Grade students remember moving rocks to build a small dam, as Second Graders last year, and were able to see it working this past week! Students decided that we need to construct a second dam with rocks and clay on the other side of our little “rain river” that runs through the middle of the farm, and some of them have been working on this a bit each day. This project will help route the rain run-off down a smaller channel to lessen soil erosion around some pasture fence posts. This has sparked many conversations about how erosion happens and what the effects are for the environment and those living in it. We will do a larger clay building project using natural clay and bamboo from our campus’s creek bed to repair the farm’s goat hut by rebuilding the roof soon.
Some of the Second Graders have shown a strong interest in supporting Third Graders in animal chores and have begun eagerly assisting where needed, mainly with the manure scooping and wheelbarrow trips to the compost. The animals are being treated to large kudzu salads collected by Second Graders and cozy, clean sleeping quarters that we are fluffing up with straw to keep them warm on cold nights. Students have commented on how much darker our composted soil looks compared to our native red clay. We will be transporting some of our finished compost around campus to support different planting areas.
Reminder: Families can send in food scraps from home! We keep a community compost wheelbarrow in the back corner of the parking lot, along with a compost bin in the staff kitchen, and at each Kindergarten platform. You are welcome to add your home compost to the wheelbarrow throughout the week. No meat products, please (egg shells are great!). Some like to collect their home compost in the freezer until a bowl/bag is full. The Fourth/Fifth Grade, as well as the First Grade Earth Education classes, help transport everything to the compost area located near the farm weekly. We add donkey manure and chicken bedding, along with dried leaves as needed for balance, to make the soil for our garden.
Take care,
Ki Heidi
