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This past Tuesday April 6th was an exciting day for students and interns alike at Hayes Valley Farm. The farm was graced with its first ever group of youth from Presidio Hill School, a co-educational independent K-8 school located in San Francisco’s Presidio District. The visit was coordinated with the help of HVF Volunteer Allie, who leads the After-School Program at Presidio Hill, as well as HVF activist/organizer Booka and Garden Educator Intern Casey.
Nine children, ages 5-9, and three adults arrived to the farm at 11am to begin their day of holistic education. Blue skies and a pleasant springtime breeze brought smiles to the faces of all. Introductions were in order, as were blue-tape nametags in line with our farm tradition. The group formed a circle and played “Name Yourself and Your Favorite Fruit or Vegetable” which solicited delicious responses like artichokes, tomatoes, and persimmons. On to the farm tour, where the group was led up the south side off-ramp from coconut coir hill to sheet mulch heaven. The curious youth loved touching the various soils and discerning their differences, which led to great Q&As surrounding soil building, organic fertilizers, and nutrient solutions.
The farm tour ended up at the Freeway Fruit Forest where the educators explained the purpose behind container gardening and companion planting, as well as our intentional selection of San Francisco specific flora. The group gazed in awe down below at Fava Bean Hillside for an enlightening lesson on nitrogen fixation, or in kid terms, the bright greens giving back. Fava beans are a great tool to help us reinforce the connectivity of all living things.
The team moved on to a collective brown bag lunch followed by a composting exercise and hands-on worm bin maintenance. The kids loved holding the squirmy wormy invertebrate- Who wouldn’t? They coupled the interactive worm lesson with coloring images of worms to be laminated and stuck to the worm bin itself. This way, the artistic impact of the kids will live on at the farm.
The final hour at the farm was comprised of hands-on planting and button making, two activities that provided the kids with take-home goodies to cherish in the days to come. They were given small plastic planter pots to sow their legume of choice, either Blue Pole Beans or Scarlet Runner Beans. Their homework- to water, watch, and wait 60 days for their bean to sprout. And for the buttons- Each kid decorated his or her very own Hayes Valley Farm seal which was magically transformed into a 3” badge and served as a memento of their amazing inaugural visit to Hayes Valley Farm.
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