Farm visit from James Thomson School

As part of the Farm to School program run at James Thomson Elementary by my friend Francine, Doug and I hosted a "farm visit" from twenty Year 6 and 7 students. As the school is only around the corner, they walked over with their teacher and spent around an hour getting demonstrations of the beehives from Doug and picking strawberries with me.  As a treat, I put out tubs of our honey and some from Cuba that Ron brought back, so that everyone a chance to taste the amazing difference and realise that what bees eat profoundly affects the honey.  When Jono, the teacher, asked who had never tried honey before, 7 kids out of 20 put up their hands!  I was astounded.  I knew that these kids, most of whom live on the reserve at Sliammon, ate a lot of processed food and not much variety at that, but this really drove it home.  To them it was mainly just a chance to not be in the classroom, but I am so happy that we got to share our produce with them.  Next term I'm going to work with this same class to create some drawings for the food map of Wildwood we are making; maybe a bee or a strawberry will show up!

nothing tastes quite like the first real salad of the year

I was able to harvest my first super-salad of the year last week: red onion, spring onion, baby carrots, spinach, shunjiku, three types of lettuce, rocket, parsley, basil, chives and cilantro.  I chopped and shredded, threw in some toasted nuts and tossed it all in a dressing of honey, garlic, balsamic, olive oil and sea salt.  Ahhh.  As I munched I tasted all the promise of the crops to come (bring on the beets!) and felt very lucky and deeply satisfied.

the littlest one

I have to say, Amy has a talent for producing quality rug-rats.  Baby Rowan is just the latest of a very cute trio.  He smells so good I want to eat him :)