Neopermaculture update...Summer is coming and continuity is the key.
Neopermaculture is about solving problems in the world as they are presented, not the problems that we would like to solve. It is essentially permaculture in context with the rest of the world.
This year, our focus has been on school gardens. We engaged in a project that helped educate 100 students in Augusta, Atlanta, Greenville SC, and Seattle, WA. We have had some interesting results, this being our first year.
This has been the crucial point in this project and the idea of neopermaculture as we are looking at our mission. The main reason is that the garden is just cranking up but the school year is coming to an end.
This is the part of the school garden that we do not see in the memes floating over social media and in the calls for funding. Most of what we see are the pleas in the spring to get things going. They come when the weather is bright and sunny and it is still cool outside. We get those pleas, letters for help and involvement and those are great but this is the time when the farm is full swing.
Right now in our gardens, all the things the kids have learned and worked on are just starting to ripen and grow and many of those people who worked so hard to get funding and supplies are thinking about taking their kids and families to the beach.
They will return in the fall to a patch of largely ignored and overgrown land and new students won't recognize what it was.
The goal with our project is to make sure these things do not happen. While all times in the garden are active, yes even winter, summer is one of the most active times and there is a lot to see then, even while the kids are at the beach.
So this is the key to this project and the neopermaculture plan overall. Starting and stopping a garden or gardening when it is convenient is problematic. It takes energy to start a garden and it takes even more energy to RE-start a garden. This means being out there from the very beginning even when it is hot and or developing methods for making changes to the garden.
Also, from an internal political standpoint, when a garden is started and left to go fallow over the summer, and then someone steps up to work on it the next year, the fallow garden serves as an example of a "failure" and it is just that much tougher to sell the idea of starting it again. We want to avoid a cycle of neglect and create what is called "institutional memory" and ownership in the project. 10 years from now we want graduating seniors to be working with 3rd graders in 2027 on the new phase of the garden using descendants of the seed from things they grew today.
The key to neopermaculture in this respect is continuity and keeping these things going. Our program has engaged 3rd graders, but is also geared to maintaining that engagement over the summer and into the following year while next year also engaging a new class of 3rd graders.
So our kids are working on this project over the summer as part of an extracurricular study. They are working on robots in the garden. They are working on methodologies for maintaining communications over the summer via social media and even their own programming strategies. Moreover, they are recognizing that the summer is not just 3 months of downtime for their brain and the garden.
The focus is on focus and encouraging the realization that things are not only happening when the kids are looking directly at them, but continuously. Preliminary feedback is showing that our methodology is helping a great deal with attention span in some students but we stress this is only feedback from the parents. Still it is something that we are going to investigate. It is a cycle. Making sure the cycle continues is the key.
The #takeatomato project is going to play a large part in this project's first year. Students will be taking plants home with them with one objective, to keep it alive and document its growth over the summer. We will also be engaging them in some projects that we have outlined on this blog like seed saving and cloning and a few more projects that are easy for adults and kids alike.
Pamela Darhoten is an administrative assistant with The Life Cooperative and works on the garden in Doraville, GA just outside of Atlanta daily.
If you would like to contribute and help us keep the garden going over the summer and beyond
Follow us on Twitter at Thelifecoop
Follow us on Instagram at The Life Cooperative
This year, our focus has been on school gardens. We engaged in a project that helped educate 100 students in Augusta, Atlanta, Greenville SC, and Seattle, WA. We have had some interesting results, this being our first year.
This has been the crucial point in this project and the idea of neopermaculture as we are looking at our mission. The main reason is that the garden is just cranking up but the school year is coming to an end.
This is the part of the school garden that we do not see in the memes floating over social media and in the calls for funding. Most of what we see are the pleas in the spring to get things going. They come when the weather is bright and sunny and it is still cool outside. We get those pleas, letters for help and involvement and those are great but this is the time when the farm is full swing.
Right now in our gardens, all the things the kids have learned and worked on are just starting to ripen and grow and many of those people who worked so hard to get funding and supplies are thinking about taking their kids and families to the beach.
They will return in the fall to a patch of largely ignored and overgrown land and new students won't recognize what it was.
 |
| first tomatoes still green. |
The goal with our project is to make sure these things do not happen. While all times in the garden are active, yes even winter, summer is one of the most active times and there is a lot to see then, even while the kids are at the beach.
So this is the key to this project and the neopermaculture plan overall. Starting and stopping a garden or gardening when it is convenient is problematic. It takes energy to start a garden and it takes even more energy to RE-start a garden. This means being out there from the very beginning even when it is hot and or developing methods for making changes to the garden.
Also, from an internal political standpoint, when a garden is started and left to go fallow over the summer, and then someone steps up to work on it the next year, the fallow garden serves as an example of a "failure" and it is just that much tougher to sell the idea of starting it again. We want to avoid a cycle of neglect and create what is called "institutional memory" and ownership in the project. 10 years from now we want graduating seniors to be working with 3rd graders in 2027 on the new phase of the garden using descendants of the seed from things they grew today.
The key to neopermaculture in this respect is continuity and keeping these things going. Our program has engaged 3rd graders, but is also geared to maintaining that engagement over the summer and into the following year while next year also engaging a new class of 3rd graders.
So our kids are working on this project over the summer as part of an extracurricular study. They are working on robots in the garden. They are working on methodologies for maintaining communications over the summer via social media and even their own programming strategies. Moreover, they are recognizing that the summer is not just 3 months of downtime for their brain and the garden.
The focus is on focus and encouraging the realization that things are not only happening when the kids are looking directly at them, but continuously. Preliminary feedback is showing that our methodology is helping a great deal with attention span in some students but we stress this is only feedback from the parents. Still it is something that we are going to investigate. It is a cycle. Making sure the cycle continues is the key.
The #takeatomato project is going to play a large part in this project's first year. Students will be taking plants home with them with one objective, to keep it alive and document its growth over the summer. We will also be engaging them in some projects that we have outlined on this blog like seed saving and cloning and a few more projects that are easy for adults and kids alike.
Pamela Darhoten is an administrative assistant with The Life Cooperative and works on the garden in Doraville, GA just outside of Atlanta daily.
If you would like to contribute and help us keep the garden going over the summer and beyond
Follow us on Twitter at Thelifecoop
Follow us on Instagram at The Life Cooperative
Comments
Post a Comment