Our first Gardens to Hospitals event is about to kick-off next week in Jackson, CA. Gardens to Hospitals (G2H) is a project of Lisa’s Organics - an organic, frozen vegetable producer based in Lake Tahoe, CA. In short, G2H partners school gardens with hospitals to raise awareness for healthy meal programs and install edible gardens at the hospital. In Jackson, students from local Argonaut High School will lead a food lesson at Sutter Amador Hospital for area children ages 4-7 years old. The lesson plays off a campaign that ran in 2011 for National Nutrition Month called “Eat Your Colors!” Unfortunately, the brilliant campaign only ran for that one month and was archived. Ironically, the campaign is very similar to Lisa’s Organics brand slogan, “Eat Your Veggies.”

I immediately saw the parallel and began to brainstorm! The result…adorable, fridge magnets as shown in the example to the left. There are five in all. One for each of the following colors: red, green, purple, white/brown and yellow/orange. Each child that attends the G2H event will receive a packet of five magnets. After the lesson, the kids will get a chance to plant some seeds and starters in raised beds which will reside on the hospital's cafeteria patio. The high school students will remind the children about the different colors of each veggie being planted as well as the color of the veggies they will be sampling that day from local, organic farms. The kids will learn their food colors, plant the seed and taste its flavor. At home, they will play with their magnets and hopefully grab one off the fridge and say something like, “Mom, I want purple veggies for dinner!”

Speaking of "colors." The growing dome has been exploding with color the last couple weeks. We are into our 6th week of harvests donating 10-12lbs of assorted greens to our local hunger relief agency, Project Mana. But last week, we started adding radishes and this week beets and carrots. One of my favorite food films, Fridays at the Farm, described the sensation of harvesting radishes to "pulling teeth from the mouth of God!" I love that visual. Today, I got the same satisfaction from harvesting the carrots. With radishes and beets, you can pretty much tell how big the root is before you pull it out of the ground. Carrots on the other hand are a big surprise. They don't reveal their size till plucked. You grab the base of the stem and start pulling. I don't know why but I was half expecting 1-2" puny, roots but on average, they were more like 6-7" long. I sounded like I was watching fireworks instead of harvesting vegetables as exclamations erupted from my mouth, "Ooooh, Wow!"  With each pull I was more and more elated as these striking orange sticks continued to come out of the ground. I felt a little like a magician pulling a scarf out of their sleeve...i just kept pulling and pulling. I love farming!

Check out the video below for a virtual tour of the dome and exciting times on harvest day!

Last Saturday the 21st marked the 42nd Earth Day! Hopefully, you all got out to hug Mother Earth and honor her magnificence! The Tahoe-Truckee Earth Day Foundation has been hosting a ragingly, successful celebration for the past eight years in the village at Squaw Valley, CA. I wore two hats running back and forth between our Slow Food Lake Tahoe booth and the kids' zone where the grow dome had a craft project to decorate compost buckets...

At the grow dome, we will be embarking upon a relatively large, composting program. We will be collecting yard waste from an eco-friendly landscaper, Green Envy, and organic coffee grounds from Sierra Pacific Coffee Roasters. To feed enough greens and nitrogen to the compost pile, we will be recruiting the veggie and fruit scraps from friends and family. We are supplying each contributor with a 5gl pickle bucket to keep their food scraps smell-tight. We will schedule weekly pick-ups and feed the compost pile the organic waste collected. To make it fun and encourage participation,we wanted to have kids decorate the buckets. Each art piece was transferred to a sticker which could be applied to the bucket so it provided an easy to clean surface. We got a variety of great submissions, see below.

Over at the Slow Food booth, we had a festive seedling table where we helped kids make seedling pots out of newsprint! Each child got to take home at least one seedling in a cute caring case made out of milk cartons. This is a great project for all kinds of events from birthday parties and school projects to just a fun way to brighten up a rainy day! Kids and volunteers had a blast and got way into it!

The grow dome and the Truckee Community Farm received its first news article! Read the entire story in our local paper at the Sierra Sun, click here.

The story wasn't so much about the grow dome's unique structure but rather how its design enabled an April harvest in a mountain climate which could be donated to the local hunger relief agency and supplement their food distribution.

It is definitely raising eyebrows in our community for what's possible in agriculture. If you are wondering what the reporter means by "clothes dryer" in the first paragraph, I was telling her how some farmers use not only large lettuce spinners to clean the greens but clothes dryer when on the low-delicate setting. I took a short video of an example this summer when I was at a farm that had one. Here's the video for the clothes dryer lettuce spinner.

The grow dome is really starting to take off. We are harvesting greens at least once a week: chard, spinach, lettuce, and mustard greens. Keep in mind, this is Tahoe in April. On average, the dome heats up b/w 75-95°F everyday. And at night, the dome is typically 25°F warmer inside than out. It got down to 12°F the other night and it was 37°F in the dome. The thermal mass of the water tank is really doing its job to retain the heat and the 4-walled, poly-carbonate exterior is keeping it trapped inside. They make a good team! This week we are making our first food donation to our local hunger relief agency, Project Mana. The original goal of the dome was to supplement food for Project Mana's weekly food distribution. Considering it is only April, we are doing pretty good. Take a seedling tour by watching the video below.

This week's project has been to get our last, big bed ready for planting. The other beds all had wonderful, compost-enriched, garden soil from our local compost authority, Full Circle Compost in Minden, NV. The garden bed by the water tank, however, only has about 10% of this yummy stuff. The rest of it is our native, clay-heavy, rock-ridden soil. With all that clay, it clots up into tight chunks as soon as water hits it. It needed help! It needed to have the big rocks removed and amended generously with organic compost to turn the clay dense soil into more of a loamy soil. Below is a photo progression of how I did it. It is so rewarding. I felt like I was mining for gold as I sifted the native soil through the screen and revealed this fluffy, aerated soil. Loosened and rock-free, the soil was now capable of being mixed with compost which would feed the soil food web and awakened its growing power.

Monday the 5th is three days before the full moon and according to the biodynamics calendar, it is a good day to plant above-ground, leafy green vegetables. It will be our first official planting in the grow dome. And what better veggies to start with than cold-hardy, winter greens like spinach, arugula, parsley and bok choy.

Meanwhile, waiting patiently in the back corner of the dome is the 3200gl water tank. It plays an essential role in regulating temperatures in the dome acting as a thermal mass in winter to capture heat during the day and as a cooling mass in summer to keep the dome from overheating. But in true permaculture spirit, the tank can serve dual, even triple purposes....permaculture likes when you stack systems and cycle different eco-services.

One of the dual functions that the water tank will serve is for Aquaponics. I'm just learning about this technique but I'm already fascinated by its potential. Both aquaponics and hydroponics grow plants without soil. The plant is suspended in a tray allowing only its roots to touch nutrient rich water that is being circulated. Hydroponics uses nutrient additives to feed the plants where as aquaponics generates its own nutrients between a symbiotic relationship between fish and plants. The fish poop then microbes in the water convert the amonia-rich waste into nitrates making it available to the plants to absorb as food. The plants then filter the water as it passes through the system and back to the fish. It's a closed loop, organic system unlike hydroponics which takes a lot of inputs many of which can be synthetic.

Tilapia is a common aquaponics fish and they eat water based plants like duckweed or watercress that float on the water's surface. At full capacity, a 3200gl water tank could hold enough fish to grow food for three 900sqft domes. But in our system, aquaponics is an added value not the primary growing style. Soil-based farming is our focus and the water tank's primary role is to regulate temperature in the dome. Aquaponics allows us to stack an additional function on the water tank and by running it at a quarter of its aquaponics capacity, we can use the nutrient-rich water to not only feed the aquaponic plants but irrigate the crops in the gardens beds as well. By building a trellis above the the water tank, we can take advantage of the open space above the garden beds that would otherwise go unused.

I've been back in Tahoe two months now. In the absence of snow, I've been hard at work shaping what will hopefully be a bountiful career in food activism. It is only the beginning but I can feel the momentum gaining.

First up is a philanthropic campaign for Lisa's Organics. Lisa's is based in Lake Tahoe and are producers of organic, frozen vegetables. They are taking their "Eat Your Veggies" slogan and helping schools and hospitals improve their meal programs.

School gardens are sprouting up all over the country,  lunch programs are becoming healthier and more hospitals are sourcing sustainably grown food. Lisa's Organics' "Gardens to Hospitals," hopes to keep that momentum going.
The program’s goal is to bring awareness to the role of nutritious food in raising and nurturing healthy children. The children themselves will help lead the effort advocating for healthier meals both in their schools and in hospitals. Students with a school garden will grow food for children in a hospital. They will come together in a food and information sharing event at the hospital snacking on the food grown. Together, all the kids will gain a better connection to their food and healthy eating habits. In the process, the food buyers at both the school and the hospital will be forced to look into the eyes of the children they are feeding and answer to the choices they are making. 

Institutional food, like at schools and hospitals, represents a significant percentage of the food consumed in the United States. Harnessing the collective buying power of institutions to  purchase more nutritious and ecologically grown food could dramatically alter the US food economy. Their critical mass could provide the organic market the weight necessary to tip the scales away from conventional agriculture.

Next up, is a farming project in Tahoe. Yes, Tahoe! I will be helping to launch a program to explore mountain farming techniques in a 1000 sq. ft grow dome (geodesic greenhouse). The practices utilized are those perfected by the 4-season, hoop-house, guru, Eliot Coleman. This is my first step in helping my high-elevation community achieve food security. If successful, more grow domes will be built and perhaps even a grants program developed to help citizens acquire smaller, 350 sq. ft. domes for their backyards. My goal...20% of Tahoe using grow domes by 2020.

The grow dome hopes to be an extension of the community garden in Truckee Regional Park. In a demonstration setting, people can get acquainted with agriculture and learn about the growing methods used at the dome. The grow dome(s) would be the community farm growing food not only for schools, hospitals and a CSA program but more importantly the local hunger relief program, Project Mana. The grow dome and the possibility of feeding Tahoe with food grown on its own soil, is the vision and inspiration of local entrepreneurs, Bill and Kevin Kelly.