Members of the horticulture class, Esveidy Gutierrez, 12, Cruz Garcia, 12, Breanna Navarro, 11, and Ruby Gomez, 11, sample a salad prepared by John McReynolds, the culinary director Stone Edge Farm, during a cooking demonstration near the school garden at Altimira Middle School in Sonoma, California on Wednesday, November 14, 2012. (BETH SCHLANKER/ The Press Democrat)

By Dianne Reber Hart

Sonoma Valley chef John McReynolds is well accustomed to the discerning tastes of upscale diners, but usually his guests have passed adolescence. Not the case on a recent chilly November day as he cooked outdoors for a group of his suppliers – horticulture students at Altimira Middle School.

Seated at picnic tables adjacent to their nearly half-acre school garden, students watched attentively as McReynolds and his assistant, Eduardo Haro, carefully chopped kale leaves into thin slices for specialty soup and salad dishes.

“The fun part about this, we grew all this food that you see,” McReynolds told the gathering. “This kale was picked just moments ago.”

For Altimira horticulture teacher Dutch Van Herwynen, the occasion was nothing short of a long-anticipated restaurant grand opening.

The cooking demonstration marked a new phase in the three-year-old School Garden Project, one that now matches local chefs with each of the 11 school gardens in the Sonoma Valley Unified School District.

“This was just a great thing for me personally, for the program and for all kinds of people who’ve put a lot of energy into this,” Van Herwynen said.

McReynolds, the culinary director at Stone Edge Farm vineyards and winery, is a champion of the School Garden Project. Stone Edge Farm shares the belief in sustainable agriculture and farm-to-table cooking and provided more than $100,000 in grant monies for the project.

McReynolds considers the program a “reintroduction” of simpler days when people sourced their own food, canning what they couldn’t immediately use and having a big part in their own healthy eating.

“I feel like this information is the future of eating,” McReynolds said. “A couple of generations have become disconnected with where their food comes from.”

Teachers, volunteers and paid garden coordinators throughout the school district are working with students from kindergarten through high school to change that.

Second-year horticulture student Max Psaledakis so enjoys working with the Altimira garden that he’s planning to study horticulture in college.

“I just love it, I really love it,” the 13-year-old said. “I like to garden and it’s really fun. And Mr. Van is just the best teacher ever.”

Van Herwynen – simply “Mr. Van” to his students – said the School Garden Project reaches far beyond his expectations. For students who struggle academically, the hands-on “learn-by-doing” horticulture class is a place to excel and gain confidence.

Van Herwynen also discovered that the garden, located in a back corner of the campus, is a sanctuary for students who just need a quiet place to get away from the stresses of middle school. And at a campus where nearly 70 percent of the students come from poor backgrounds, the garden serves as an open space for planting they often don’t have at home.

Van Herwynen and Altimira Principal Will Deeths are working to position Altimira as a magnet agriculture campus, with hopes of establishing a career pathway program for high school, college and beyond.

Altimira students take horticulture as their one elective class, opting to work in the garden rather than study drama, music, technology or any of the other electives offered. In just three years, the program has expanded from one horticulture class to three.

The curriculum blends practical applications of math, science, nutrition, business and environmental studies while teaching students everything from plant propagation, landscaping and pruning to soil chemistry, composting and carpentry.

Altimira’s garden features several dozen fruit and heritage olive trees, two large greenhouses and some 25 raised beds where students grow a wide assortment of organic produce and flowers.

To help support the program, students sell bags of fresh-picked produce and floral bouquets at school for a $5 donation. They’ve also sold their goods at a seasonal farmers’ market and each week sell four or five pounds of baby lettuce to the school cafeteria. In addition, they’ve donated their produce to local programs for the hungry.

Sonoma food, wine and travel writer Kathleen Thompson Hill is the founder and director of the School Garden Project. She has an impressive list of achievements to her credit but insists the project is her greatest accomplishment.

“This to me is the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “There’s just this renewed interest in food and how we grow it.”

Watching McReynolds interact with Altimira students – who deemed his cooking “delicious” – was the grand prize to all her early efforts getting the project up and running. “It’s the culmination of all our work,” Hill said.

She credits the project’s continued success to the school district, the Sonoma Valley Education Foundation and a long list of businesses and service groups. The Valley of the Moon Vintage Festival and the Fairmont Hotel are the latest donors to support the project.

Louann Carlomagno, the school district superintendent, said the School Garden Project exemplifies the collaborative spirit of the community.

“It’s a great community passion,” she said. “The community has done the lion’s share of supporting the gardens.”

Principal Deeths can just look at his students and know the program is working. The real joy, he said, is watching students deliver their flowers and veggies to the school office for awaiting customers.

“They just have such pride on their faces. They have an actual, tangible thing in their hands that they’ve accomplished,” he said.
For more information about the School Garden Project, visit svgreatschools.com or kathleenthompsonhill.com.

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HOMEOWNERS are being asked to donate their gardens to aid a scheme which helps unemployed people blossom.

Dig Deep is an initiative which helps unemployed residents of Gloucester gain valuable skills.

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Currently there are six volunteers with skills in building, landscaping carpentry and decorating.

Paul Stepney, project coordinator, said: “The team would like to transfer someone’s garden into what they would like, individual or community garden.

“The garden tasks need to include a selection of jobs such as clearance work, decking, laying a patio, foundation preparation, turf laying or grass seeding, selecting and arranging, winter resistant shrubbery, block-paved drive ways, walls , fencing, shed construction or repairs.”

All the homeowner has to provide is the materials, coffee, tea, access to toilets and a donation which covers volunteer expenses.

For more details, contact Paul on 01452 505544 or alternatively please email pauls@glcommunities.org.uk.

By Neil Sperry

My ribs are often bruised. My elbows have assumed quick reflexes. It seems that my pitch isn’t perfect, and my musician wife keeps nudging me up or down every time that I sing. After 45 years of otherwise happy marriage, I’ve learned that it’s a lot easier just to sing softly.

And, so it is that I nudge gently into several landscaping scenes. They’re places where I see gardeners taking their efforts off-focus. Let me ‘splain, Lucy.

Your house is the biggest piece of artwork that you’ll ever own. You need to think of it as a magnificent painting, and everything you do should showcase its beauty and conceal its blemishes.

You need a lovely frame for your painting, and that frame comes in the form of the landscape. The landscape’s function is to complement the artwork, not draw undue attention from it. You wouldn’t choose pink polka dots for your Monet’s frame. You would look for something tasteful and simple, probably elegant and perhaps natural. And, that frame would be in scale with the size of the artwork.

Let’s move on to specifics. Here are some of the ways I see gardeners getting too “cute” with their landscaping, and taking its true purpose off course. Almost every one of us has tried one or two of these over the years, and in many cases, we’ve realized that we missed our mark — that our great idea wasn’t really so hot. In each case, I’ll try to give a couple of alternatives.

We forget the focal point. The place you want to draw viewers’ eyes will be to your front door. It is to your house what Mona Lisa’s eyes are to her beauty. Never forget it as you design.

Narrow beds. This is that “scale” thing. If your house is two-story, and if your property is reasonably large, the beds you design need to be appropriately sized. That might mean that they’re a minimum of 5 to 7 feet wide, and they might even roll out to 12 or 15 feet around corners and at the entry.

On the other hand, if you’re landscaping a one-story home on a small urban property, bed widths need to be scaled back to 3 or 4 feet wide, broadening to 6 or 7 feet at corners. This whole scale and proportion thing can be compared back to the picture frames. If you’re framing a large painting that will hang behind the sofa, you’ll use a wider frame than you would for an 8-by-10-inch hallway photo of the family.

Straight beds. These points build on one another, and we’ve already alluded to the fact that your beds might have varying widths, wider at the entry and corners, and narrowing in between. Your goal in landscaping is to create a pleasant natural “meadow” into which your house magically appears. Nature works in curves, almost never in straight lines. Long, gentle and sweeping curves will be more visually appealing. Straight beds merely repeat the lines of the house. Unless you’re creating a highly stylized formal garden, it’s better to avoid straight lines.

Attempting symmetry in an asymmetric world. Most houses are not mirror images, one side to the other. It’s usually better not to use a mirrored landscape plan. Even if it were to be completed perfectly and maintained without flaw, your design might still look restless to your eye, and you might not be able to determine why. Look at 25 random landscapes around you, and somewhere among them, you’ll surely see what I mean.

Square shrubs. This is another function of repeating the lines of the house. Choose plants that grow to the height and width you need, then let them grow naturally. Oh, sure, you can trim them and guide them, but always do so with an eye toward maintaining their natural form. If you have shrubs that have been cut square for many years, try selective pruning next year as you allow them to grow back into their natural habits. Or, remodel and replace them with something new. Odds are that you’ll be glad you did.

Bold, conspicuous edging. I’m always amazed that people buy edging, then install it in a way where it shows. It’s kinda like letting your underwear show. No, wait a minute. I guess that’s fashionable. Oh, well. With landscaping, you still won’t want edging to extend more than an inch above the soil line. You’re using it as a means of defining your beds, not as an architectural statement in your gardens.

Rings around shade trees. Trunks are not the most beautiful parts of our shade trees. Why would we want to highlight them? Why would we want to showcase them with metal rings or circles of stone? Why would we feel compelled to plant flowers against them? All that does is draw attention away from the entryway and out into the landscape. Better design would be to let grass grow up the trunk and keep it neatly maintained. When shade eventually causes the grass to fail, then you would develop groundcover beds with irregularly sweeping curves. The tree would not be in the center of the bed.

Row-plantings along the front walk. If you have a winding walkway, plantings like this might be good to help give direction, but if your walk goes from the street to your door, there’s no need to emphasize the sidewalk. Again, it’s not the focal point of your garden, and there’s no need to create a visual “zipper” that splits your landscape into two halves.

Neil Sperry publishes “Gardens” magazine and hosts “Texas Gardening” from 8 to 11 a.m. Sundays on WBAP AM/FM. Reach him during those hours at 800-288-9227 or 214-787-1820.

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