January 15, 2023 Leave a comment

Fresh Roots in the Off Season: What do you do in the winter?

By Kat Vriesema-Magnuson, Director of Experiential Learning

When I’m meeting someone new and they ask about my job, I generally say something like “I run educational programs on an urban schoolyard farm! We do school field trips in the spring and fall, and a day camp in the summer.” It’s always interesting to see what connections people make, and what questions they ask. Often I hear stories of their gardens, or ones they knew as a kid, or questions about what we grow. One question I get frequently is “What do you do in the winter?” The answer is: surprisingly a lot! It’s a question we ask our Year on the Farm classes to think about when they visit the farms in the off season, from November through early March – what do our farms do in the winter, and what are our farmers doing?

Resting

Rest is essential for all living things! We cannot grow all the time, and the dark, cold days of winter are an important time to take some quiet time for ourselves. Rest now will give us the ability to do the hard work needed during the growing season.

Decomposing/recomposing

Under the mulch that covers our farms through the winter, the bacteria, fungi, and invertebrates are at work eating last years leaves, roots, and stems, and leaving behind nutrient rich soil. We do the same thing! We look at what we did last year, what worked, what didn’t, what we should leave behind, and what we can transform into something new to help us grow stronger in the coming year.

Learning and Connecting

While we have fewer youth and veggies on the farms to tend to, there is still a lot of learning and growing happening! This time of year, we’re meeting with our school and community partners, recruiting volunteers, and hiring our seasonal staff. We also take some time for professional development, as a whole staff and as individuals, learning from lots of different sources and gaining new perspectives on the work we do and how it connects with others.

Making Plans

Before we can plant, we have to plan. Our Good Food team is planning crops and harvests, veggie boxes and markets, and how to get food into the hands of people who need it. The Youth Empowerment team is planning SOYL Spring Break and summer programs. And my team, Experiential Learning, is already booking spring field trips and getting ready to launch summer camp registration in February, along with reviewing and updating lesson plans and creating new awesome activities.

Sharing Stories

In many cultures, winter is a time for storytelling. In the winter, we write our annual Impact Report (see last year’s here), to share our stories with our supporters, speak at teacher ProD days, and prepare for conferences. We also visit classes in our Year on the Farm program to see the stories seeds can tell. And I’m working on making our learning resources easier to access for teachers!

I hope you are all finding time to rest, decompose, learn and connect, plan, and share your stories this winter, and we’ll see you on the farm in just a few months!

Kat Vriesema-Magnuson
Director, Experiential Learning Programs

Camp staff Puff and Turnip use puppets to share Worm loves Worm with campers. In the background is their group community agreement.

July 28, 2022 Leave a comment

Happy Pride!

Camp staff Puff and Turnip use puppets to share Worm loves Worm with campers. In the background is their group community agreement showing what the group values.

It’s Pride Week in Vancouver, and awkward as it feels to say it, I’m proud of Fresh Roots and our commitment to inclusion of people across the sexuality and gender spectrums. I’m especially proud of how that’s showing up at Camp Fresh Roots and how we’re able to support our gender diverse campers and staff. Where we are today feels so different from the camps I worked at as a youth. As telling our stories and remembering where we’ve come from is an important part of Pride, I hope you’ll indulge a bit of personal history.

As a young queer* woman working at a Girl Scout camp in the Seattle area back in the late 1990’s, being vocally gay was seen as “not camper appropriate.” It was something you could be in the staff house (and there were a lot of us – it’s where I met my spouse!), but not in front of the kids. In other parts of the country, similar camps were firing or not rehiring staff just because of their sexual orientation. Gender diversity wasn’t something I even remember talking about – trans people existed, but not at camp. (Several of my coworkers from that time have since come out as trans and/or non-binary, because of course they did exist at camp.) The idea that campers might be queer? Well, a trans 8 year old or a pansexual 12 year old wasn’t something we even thought about. This was, for the time, what a supportive camp environment looked like.

When I took on creating Camp Fresh Roots in 2017, I wanted it to be a space where campers and staff thrived and were able to bring their full selves. When we can be our full selves, and when we can see people like us as role models, that is when we thrive, connect, and build relationships. That’s when we live in joy. And Fresh Roots is all about building joyful relationships with food, land, and community.

Despite twenty plus years of social progress, we still live in a heteronormative, cis-centric society, so it’s taken specific intent and actions to realize our goals. The actions we’ve taken to create this space can be done by anyone just about anywhere. Many of them support our campers’ and staff’s other unique identities as well!

We recognize that there is no one “standard” family. We talk about “families” and “adults” instead of “mom and dad” or “parents.” Our forms don’t assume the genders or relationships of the most important adults in a camper’s life.
We honour people’s chosen names. While we need legal names for some documentation, we ask for preferred names and use those exclusively at camp. All our staff use camp names, which is a decades old camp tradition I wanted to bring to Fresh Roots. It’s also proving a really great way to introduce campers to the idea of respecting people’s chosen names, and the concept that people may use different names in different places or at different times.
We honour people’s pronouns. Pronouns can be tricky. For younger campers, the idea of what a pronoun is may be new; older campers may struggle with using pronouns differently than they are used to. So we take a multistep approach to this. All staff are introduced with their pronouns during the All Camp welcome on Monday mornings and have pronoun pins they can wear. Staff are empowered to engage in discussions with their camper groups about their gender identities and pronouns; some of our camper groups have chosen to make their own pronoun buttons. And we have a few books in our collection that help facilitate those conversations, especially around non-binary identities:
- Worm Loves Worm (this is our favorite this summer!)
- My Shadow is Purple
- They, She, He, Easy as ABC
We have universal washrooms. It can be hard to decide what washroom you should use if your options are “boys” or “girls” and you’re not a boy or a girl. While we’ve always had single stall washrooms available, having to use a different washroom from your peers can feel exclusionary. And once you’re in a stall, does it really matter? So this summer we’ve made our washrooms universal by the high tech solution of art taped over the words “boys” or “girls”. (This also solves the problem of when more kids need to use the bathroom than there are stalls available in the “correct” washroom, or one of them is being cleaned. Inclusivity for the win!)

We are, as always, still learning and growing in how we can create a truly welcoming space, but we’re seeing the rewards of that work in how our staff and campers show up every day. The focus of our camp is growing, cooking, and sharing delicious food, learning about and caring for the natural world that supports that food, and making and deepening friendships and community connections. Knowing that at the same time we are creating a world where everyone is free to be who they are and love who they love, well, that’s definitely something to be proud of.

With 🏳️‍🌈 Pride and Joy 🏳️‍⚧️

Kat “Half-Note” Vriesema-Magnuson

*Queer can be a divisive term and has been used derogatorily for over 100 years. It is also a term that queer people have been using to describe themselves for that same length of time. In modern usage, it sometimes serves as an umbrella term for refer broadly to non-straight and/or non-cisgender people. Personally, it’s the label I took for myself as a young adult and is still the one that fits best with who I am and how I move through the world. As always, if you don’t know what words someone would like used for them, it’s always best to ask!

September 18, 2020 Leave a comment

Take Learning Outside This Fall!

Fall is (almost) here, and the rain is due any day now. Whether your kids are learning in school, online,though a distributed learning program, or home learning, don’t let the rain keep you inside. Fall is a magical time to learn outside.

Deep Learning

We’ve always known that hands-on, experiential learning creates the kind of deep learning and connection that lasts. That’s why we welcome over 2000 field trip students a year to our farms to dig in the soil, plant seeds, harvest carrots, and connect to the living ecosystems that make our food systems possible. And playing and learning in the natural world allows us to learn with all our senses. Sure, you could look at a diagram of a tomato plant and watch a video about how they grow. But it’s no match to smelling that fresh tomato leaf scent as you brush through rough leaves, searching out just the ripest, reddest fruit, giving it a gentle tug to pull it from the vine, and then popping it in your mouth (after a quick wash). You can really feel how all that sunlight captured by the leaves and water and nutrients taken in by the roots has transformed into the sweet, bright, juicy fruit in your mouth, and how all that work done by that tomato, and the soil, rain, and sun before that (not to mention the bees!), is now nourishing you. You can’t help but feel connected, and grateful. That’s deep learning.

Healthy Learning

Health is at the front of all of our minds these days. Learning outside supports physical and mental health, as has been shown by many studies in the last few decades. Being outside in a safe place can contribute to lowered blood pressure, better immune system functioning, improved mood, better focus, and much more. Two hours a week of outside time in a natural setting, like a park, garden, wilderness area, or even an urban farm, is enough to give significant health benefits. Plus, outside is a safer choice to learn and play with friends. In fact, the BC CDC recommends taking students outside more often during the school day as a way to reduce risk of transmission of COVID-19.

Joyful Learning

While learning and joy can be found in many learning settings, even digital, joy is so much easier to access when you’re outside. From the splashing in mud puddles, to finding the longest worm, to dancing in the rain, there’s so much to inspire joy outside, no matter the weather. And by giving your students the gift of being able to find joy and magic in the natural world, you’re giving them something they’ll be able to turn to in times of struggle for the rest of their lives. You can help them find the joy in the wind, in the rain, in fallen leaves and acorns, in all that Fall brings.

Learn with Us

Fresh Roots is honoured to offer outdoor learning opportunities on our David Thompson and Van Tech schoolyard farms this fall. We offer single and multi visit field trip programs for pre-K through secondary, including curriculum-linked programs, and flexible pricing to accommodate different group sizes. All of our programs are led by experienced educators, and have carefully created health and safety protocols to make sure we’re all staying healthy and also having a great time learning. Please visit our Vancouver Field Trips page to learn more about how you can join us.

June 28, 2020 Leave a comment

Fresh Five Wrap Up

Summer is here, school is out, and my team and I are gearing up for the start of Camp Fresh Roots. (We still have a few spaces left for this summer – come play with us!) And so the time has come to wrap up the Fresh Five. It has been a labour of love to create and curate these resources over the past 12 weeks in this time of uncertainty. I hope you and your family have been able to use these activities to connect to each other, the world that surrounds you, and the food that nourishes you.

For this, our final week of this version of the Fresh Five, I’m collecting all the Fresh Roots activities, field guides, and recipes so you can revisit your favorites, or find ones you may have missed the first time around.

Field Guides

Edible Flowers

Flowers are beautiful, but did you know they can be delicious, too? Our Edible Flower Field Guide will help you identify some of the many tasty, colourful flowers you might find in your neighbourhood. It includes sustainable foraging guidelines, and an Edible Flower Bingo card you can bring with you as you go looking for treats. Please forage responsibly!

Field Guide to Edible Flowers

Native Plants in Vancouver

You don’t have to get out of the city of find native plant species! Douglas-Firs, Western Red Cedar, Salal, Sword Ferns, Bleeding Heart, and so many more are beloved plant members of our communities. This Field Guide to Native Plants will help you identify some of the many native species in our parks, yards, and school grounds. Plus, there’s a Bingo sheet to make your next walk even more fun!

Field Guide to Native Plants in Vancouver

Activity Guides

Super Seeds!

Grades K-4

One of our most popular classroom workshops is Super Seeds! And now you can try it for yourself! We’ve adapted our workshop curriculum to be done at your kitchen table, with just things you probably have on hand. If you have or can find Lima beans, I recommend them for this, as they are both very large (so it’s easy to see what’s in them), and the skins are relatively thin, so they are easy to peel.

Super Seeds Activity Guide

Food and Farmworkers

Grades 9-12

I’m a podcast person. I have about 30 different podcasts that update regularly in my feed, on topics from food to mythology to history to linguistics. So when I heard a recent episode of the US-based economics podcast Planet Money about how COVID-19 is impacting American farmworkers, I wanted to share it. This is a complex topic, touching on issues of food security, labour rights (or lack thereof), public health, and yes, econ. It’s sure to spark discussions, so we’ve made a bit of framing for it. I recommend listening to your older student and discussing it together. (And in case you’re wondering, Fresh Roots farmworkers are mostly local university students, and pay starts at $15.50/hour.)

Food and Farmworkers Activity Guide

Signs of Spring-O Neighbourhood Bingo

All Ages

Are your kids (and, let’s be honest, you) getting tired of walking around the same 5 blocks over and over again as you try to get some fresh air and gentle exercise during these days of physical distancing? Print out this Neighbourhood Bingo sheet! Look at your local environment in a whole new way as you notice how spring is blooming all around us.

Spring Bingo Card

Explore Your Spring Traditions

All Ages

At Fresh Roots, we think everyone should have healthy food, land, and communities, and one of the ways we strengthen our communities is through traditions! Whether your spring celebrations centre around a religious holiday, a natural phenomenon, or a special calendar date, talking to your elders about where those traditions come from is a great way to build relationships. Not spring anymore? You can do this same activity for other celebration seasons!

Exploring Spring Traditions Activity Guide

Make Veggie Art

Grades K-5

If you have some fruits or veggies that have been in the fridge just a little too long, Veggie Printing is a fun way to repurpose them! Not only is it a good thing to do with that limp celery, a potato that’s started growing, or the bits of your veg that aren’t going to make it into soup, it’s also a great way for kids to play with their food. When kids are encouraged to use all their senses to get to explore a carrot or asparagus in a stress-free way, they can develop a greater appreciation for them, which in turn makes them more likely to eat those vegetables!

Veggie Print Activity Guide

Touch A Mystery Veggie

Grades K-5

Nothing is more exciting than reaching into a box, bag, or jar to feel what’s inside! It turns and ordinary turnip or pepper into a mystery to solve. This lesson is one of our all-time favourites, in part because of the mystery and in part because it’s so flexible. No veggies? Use fruits, or leaves from outside, or even kitchen utensils! Use what you’ve got! For younger kids, just reaching in and guessing which of a few different options is in the box is great. For older kids, they can use this as a way to really connect with a plant they are growing or studying in a fun way. Exploring through one sense at a time is a great mindfulness activity, too.

Mystery Veggie Activity Guide

Explore Dendroclimatology

Grades 9-12

Tree rings are important tools for scientists studying global climate change, both to document a history of climate over thousands of years and to help us understand the changes happening around us today. This activity for older students uses two videos to explore what dendroclimatology is and how the stories told by trees are shaping our knowledge of climate, touching on not only science and technology, but geography, industry, and careers as well.

Dendroclimatology Activity Guide

Dissect a Stem

Grades 1-5

One of the many important things a stem does is carry water from the roots to the rest of the plant. Inside the stem are structures called xylem which provides a path for water, and the nutrients it carries, to help flowers bloom, make fruits juicy, and give leaves the water they need to make sugar through photosynthesis. Sugars from the leaves flow down the phloem that surrounds the xylem. In the stem of a celery plant, the xylem is big enough that we can see them easily with just a couple of kitchen tools.

You can try this with other stems, too. I had some success with asparagus, and I suspect bok choi would work really well, too. Experiment with the stems you have in your veggie drawer!

Stem Dissection Activity Guide

Make an Ecosystem Web

Grades 3-12

Fresh Roots grown (mainly) vegetables on our schoolyard farms. Our farmers plant rows of peas, squash, chard, lettuce, parsley, and more. We can grow nearly 100 different varieties of plants in a single season! That might sound like a lot of biodiversity, but plants and farmers are just a small part of the whole biological picture. Discover how everything from crows to fungus to the air around us contributes to the biodiversity of our farm. We do versions of this activity with kids as young as 8 all the way through adults. (Hint – making the web is only the start of the discussion!)

Farm Ecosystem Web Activity Guide

Make it Rise!

Grades K-7

Wondering why you have to let regular bread dough rise, but you can whip up banana bread and pop it in the over right away? Curious where the holes in your bread come from? What’s the difference between baking powder and baking soda anyway? Looking for an alternate way to blow up balloons for your next party? Check out this activity and learn the secrets of leavening! This one is great for kids as young as kindergarten, and there’s an extension for older kids who really want to get scientific.

Uplifting Leavening Activity Guide

Make a Plant Friend

Grades 4-12

This activity is a chance to slow down and really connect with a plant in a different way than we normally do. We often think about what a plant is called, or how it’s useful to us. That can often lead to a very one-sided relationship with plants – they give, and we take. But by making a close connection with one particular plant, we can become more in tune with what it needs and what we can give back. Plus, it’s a great excuse to hug a tree, and trees are great huggers! And don’t miss the video made by Cara at our site at Suwa’lkh School in Coquitlam.

Meet-A-Plant Activity Guide
Cara’s Plant Friends

Meet Your Local Pollinators

Grades K-8

What do pollinators need to survive? And what pollinators live in your neighbourhood? Check out this activity for all ages to learn some pollinator facts. Then, take what you’ve learned out into your neighbourhood to see which pollinators can make a happy home near you!

Neighbourhood Pollinators Activity Guide

Recipe Book

I hope you enjoyed cooking and eating all those delicious recipes as much as I enjoyed creating them. With local summer produce coming into full force, it’s a great time to revisit some of those recipes with new fruits and veggies. And to make it easy for you to find your favourites, we’ve put them all into a recipe book. Happy cooking!

Fresh Five Recipe Book

With love and a fistful of sunshine,

Kat

June 21, 2020 Leave a comment

Fresh Five: Pollinator Power!

Happy Summer Solstice everyone! Way back in April for our Flower Power week, I said we’d get to learn more about bumblebees and other pollinators, and that week is finally here! June 22-28 is Pollinator Week in Canada and the US, and with all the summer fruits and vegetables starting to show up on the farm and at your local farmer’s market, it’s a great time to think about and say thank you to the animals we can’t live without.

Did you know that one out of every three bites of food you eat relies on animal pollination? Most of the fruits (like apples, berries, and melons) and vegetables-that-are-actually-fruits (like tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and peas) we eat need animals to pollinate the plant’s flowers before it forms fruits. And many other vegetables (like carrots and beets) need pollinators to form the seeds they grow from. You can find a list of just some of the foods that need animal pollinators at the Pollinator Partnership. And that’s not even thinking about all the other plants that rely on animals to help them make seeds!

So thank a bee, bat, bird, fly, moth, butterfly, wasp, or even lemur for the work they do to help our plant friends!

Meet Your Local Pollinators

What do pollinators need to survive? And what pollinators live in your neighborhood? Check out this activity for all ages to learn some pollinator facts. Then, take what you’ve learned out into your neighbourhood to see which pollinators can make a happy home near you!

Neighbourhood Pollinators Activity Guide

Learn About Bumblebees

I’ve said before that bumblebees are my favorites. They are just so fuzzy and chill and hard working. As long as you’re not messing with them, you can get right up close and watch them harvest pollen and nectar. And especially in the morning when they are sleepy and hanging out on a flower to warm up, you can even gently pet them! (One very gentle finger, please!)

The Bumblebee Queen, by April Pulley Sayre and illustrated by Patricia J. Wynne is a fabulous way for young (and not-so-young) learners to see the whole bumblebee life cycle. And through Tumble Book Library, you can see this book come to life! To access it, you’ll need to first log into your Vancouver Public Library account, then click the link below. Don’t have a VPL account? You may be able to log in through your local library, or you can sign up for a free trial.

The Bumblebee Queen

Bees in Danger?

You’ve probably heard that bees are in trouble. Both our native bee species and commercial honeybees, which originally came from Europe, have seen declines in their numbers in the last couple of decades. You know how important our pollinators are, so you know this is a big problem for us and for other living things! But why is it happening? It’s… complicated. This activity for older students (grade 7+) helps explain some of the complexities involved. It’s focused on California, but as we’ve talked about before, a very large percentage of the produce we eat in BC is pollinated by those Californian bees.

You’ll need to create a free account to download this lesson plan!

Colony Collapse Disorder Lesson

Make a Pollinator Haven

What can you do to help our pollinators? It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3! 1, Give them some food. 2, Give them some water, and 3, give them shelter. Especially in the city, it’s hard for pollinators to find the things they need to survive, but it doesn’t take a lot to help them out. If you have enough outdoor space for a pot of flowers and a shallow dish of water, you can help make a pollinator haven. Check out the info from the David Suzuki Foundation on How to Create a Pollinator Friendly Yard for ideas, activities, and more, and the Wilderness Society’s Bee Cheat Sheet for a list of native plants that will bring all the bees to your yard!

How to Create a Pollinator Friendly Yard
Bee Cheat Sheet

Taste Pollinator Power!

Here’s another Camp Fresh Roots classic recipe – Pollinator Power Salad! You can use any fruits that are in season. Strawberries and cherries would be a great choice right now. Oh, and if you want to get extra fancy, chiffonade a few fresh basil leaves and mix them in with your fruit. You’ll thank me, and the bees!

Pollinator Power Salad

With joy and gratitude,

Kat

June 14, 2020 Leave a comment

Fresh Five: Native Plants

I grew up in this corner of the world, the coastal Pacific Northwest, and did a lot of camping as a kid. One of my most favorite summer memories is picking bright red huckleberries growing on the nurse stumps dotting the campground. I don’t know when I learned the name Huckleberry or her neighbors Sword Fern, Douglas Fir, or Oregon Grape. I’m sure it was from my parents, who had grown up camping in this ecosystem, too, who had learned from their parents or Scout leaders. Those plants have been my friends and teachers as long as I can remember.

Unlike the plants I was taught about and given the opportunity to become friends with, the same can’t be said for the Indigenous people who’s lands those plants evolved on. I knew some of their names, as they had become place names, but as a white kid living in predominantly white communities, my education about native people was limited to learning about how they “used to live,” before white people settled and built “real” cities and states and countries. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I started hearing more often about the vibrant, living traditions of Indigenous people.

I know now that I was living and learning on the lands of the Cowlitz and Clackamas; Chinook, Clatsop, and Kathlamet; Puyallup and Nisqually; and Duwamish and Suqaumish tribes and nations. (Indigenous peoples in the US generally self-identify as tribes, though some groups use nation or band.) Today, I am very grateful to live as a settler on the traditional, unceded territory of the Musqueam, Tsleil Waututh, and Squamish Coast Salish peoples. Fresh Roots also operates on the territories of the Kwikwitlem, Katzie, Sto:lo, and Qayqayt First Nations, and we are continually working to be responsible stewards of this land which is not ours.

(If you’re wondering who’s land you’ve lived on in North or South America, Australia, or New Zealand, you can find out at Native Land.)

Indigenous people have lived and learned from the land and the plants that grow there for thousands of years. If you have the opportunity to learn about your local plants directly from the people who know them the best, seek out and take advantage of that opportunity! But this week, I want to share five ways you can learn more about, and from, plants native to the Vancouver area. I hope it’s a good place to start really getting to know this beautiful part of the world.

Make a Plant Friend

Meet-A-Plant Activity Guide
Cara’s Plant Friends

Native Plants in Your Neighbourhood

Native Plant Field Guide

In Harmony with Nature

In Harmony with Nature is a project by Lori Snyder and Laura Cisneros. Lori Snyder is an Indigenous herbalist and educator, who I’ve been fortunate to learn from and who has helped Fresh Roots maintain the Indigenous Plant Garden at Van Tech Secondary. Laura Cisneros is a Cuban Art Historian and a writer focused in the experience of living and creating in a foreign language. Together, they are 2020 Artists-in-Residence at the Hasting-Sunrise Community Centre. You can learn more about what they are doing and how you can get involved at their website. And check out the blog post linked below to for an introduction to three edible species, Oregon Grape, Blue Camas, and Stonecrop.

Introduction to Three Native Plants

Birdscaping

Humans aren’t the only ones who rely on plants for food, shelter, and more. Animals do, too! Native plant and animal species have co-evolved to support one another. Choosing native species for your yard or school garden encourages native pollinators like bumblebees and butterflies (more on those next week!), and native bird species, too! Check out this guide to Birdscaping with native plants from the Environmental Youth Alliance. And if you need some plants, you can order them from our native plant propagation program at Suwa’lkh, where we work with students to grow native species to both reindigenize the forest at Suwa’lkh to sell to the wider community!

Birdscaping
Buy Native Plants!

Nesto!

Marije’s back this week for another fantastic recipe. If you liked the Carrot Top Pesto from earlier this spring, you’ll love her recipe for Nesto, AKA Nettle Pesto! And for more nettle info, you can check out the video I made way back in March when the nettles were just coming up at Van Tech.

“Stinging nettles are a delicious and exciting plant to go foraging for. They come in two subspecies: a native species, Urtica dioica gracilis which is the one we see and eat the most often, while another (Urtica dioica dioica) was introduced many years ago but is (so far) happily coexisting with the native plants of this area.

Where to look for nettles: These plants love moist places- look for clearings in a forest where some light is getting through, near river banks, in old fields, or by the sides of quiet roads. Make sure to wear long sleeves and pants, gloves, and bring a pair of scissors.

What to do once you find the nettles: Cut the tops of the plants- these are the most tasty, and this allows the plant to continue growing. Try not to touch them until they’re blanched!

Nettles are good to eat all spring and summer. Like most greens, yhey’re best eaten before they start to make flowers or seeds. Nettle pesto, or “nesto” is a great way to eat nettles – it tastes fresh, clean and green; a little bit like cucumbers! ”

Nesto Recipe Card
Kat’s Nettle Video

Plants are great teachers – get out there and learn from them!

Kat

June 7, 2020 Leave a comment

Fresh Five: Waves of Justice

This past week has been an emotionally intense one for many of us as protests continue to highlight the systemic racism in our communities, and those protests against police violence are met with violence in return. As an organization dedicated to Good Food for All, we at Fresh Roots have been working individually and collectively to find ways to show solidarity with Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized people, and to continue our ongoing work toward building a just food system. If you haven’t see it, please read our message to our community.

And through that, our work continues, of growing food, feeding families, and teaching kids and youth about the food and ecological systems we are all part of. Before joining Fresh Roots, I spent five years as a marine educator, helping kids and adults learn about the importance of our oceans, and our Salish Sea in particular, so I was excited to create this week’s Fresh Five in honor of World Ocean’s Day on Monday, June 8th.

But I also can’t ignore the vitally important conversation we’re having about racism. Environmental problems disproportionately affect marginalized communities, and racism makes it harder for some of wisest voices for conservation to be heard. We cannot truly help our oceans without also fighting racism. So this week’s Fresh Five looks at many of those ways people and oceans are connected, and some of the ways racism has made it harder for oceans, and the people who depend on them, to thrive.

How to Talk About Racism with Kids

Before we jump into the ocean, I wanted to share some resources for parents who might be struggling with how to talk about racism and the anti-racism protest movement with their kids. The first link is a written guide that provides a framework for having these conversations. And the second is a link to the Sesame Street/CNN Town Hall aimed at kids and parents.

How to Talk to Kids about Race and Racism
Coming Together: Standing Up to Racism

Oceans and People

Last weekend, I took a beach vacation to the other end of town. It was a perfect chance to see some of the many ways people connect to the ocean. There were kids playing in the sand, kayakers, people in sailboats, and even some brave swimmers using the ocean for recreation and exercise. There were also container ships and what looked like a gravel barge being pulled by a tug boat, sowing the commercial importance of waterways in our global society. And on the beach were many small clam and mussel shells and seaweed, hinting at the food the ocean provides. And, of course, many gulls, geese, and herons connecting land and water ecosystems.

This interactive story from Ocean Wise, part of the elementary Ocean Literacy course, is a great place to dive into how oceans and people are connected. Ocean Wise has lots of other fantastic resources to learn more about our oceans, too!

Ocean Literacy: Oceans and People

Sustainable Fishing

Fresh Roots was fortunate to be part of something very exciting last week. Our LunchLAB: Chefs for Families program in partnership with Growing Chefs! was gifted 100lbs of the first catch of BC spot prawns from Organic Ocean. BC spot prawns are a delicacy and only available for a few weeks a year. Why the short time frame? It’s because BC spot prawns are an example of a sustainable fishery. That means the seafood is caught in a way that doesn’t harm the ecosystem and leaves enough of the seafood in the ocean for future years.

Sustainable fishing is important for people because somewhere between 1 and 3 billion people around the world rely on seafood for their primary source of protein. Seafood is also a traditional and culturally important food for many Indigenous peoples around the world, including in BC. Indigenous people eat 15 times more seafood than non-Indigenous people globally, according to a 2016 study from UBC. That means that preserving and protecting seafood stocks for future generations is not just an environmental issue, it’s a justice issue, too.

This classic sustainable fishing simulation from the California Academy of Sciences is easily modified for a family game night – just use fewer food items or have a longer “fishing season”. Feel free to substitute any small food item for the crackers and popcorn. I’ve always played it with M&Ms!

Sustainable Fishing Game

Clam Gardening

While today our oceans are faced with over fishing, that hasn’t always been the case. For thousands of years, Hul’q’umi’num and WSÁNEĆ peoples of the Gulf Islands tended clam gardens as a form of sustainable aquaculture. Clams and their bivalve cousins mussels and oysters are some of the hardest working creatures in the sea. As filter feeders, they absorb toxins as they gather plankton, cleaning the water around them! Traditional clam gardens may be up to four times as productive as untended clam beds, which allow them to provide a continuous source of food for people while actively improving water quality. This is just one example of Indigenous knowledge of how to live in mutually beneficial relationship with the ocean and its inhabitants. Listening to and learning from Indigenous and other marginalized communities is needed to care for our oceans. We need everyone’s knowledge and ideas to solve the problems we face today.

Check out this web page from Parks Canada to learn more about clam gardens and their project to connect ecological and cultural knowledge. Be sure to watch the video!

Clam Gardens – Learning Together

Nori Wraps

For our recipe this week, I brought in one of our new Experiential Learning team members, Marije! She’ll be working with me this summer to run Camp Fresh Roots, and you’ll be seeing more of her on the blog over the next few weeks as well. Here’s what she had to say about seaweed!

“Maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up next to the ocean, but I used to imagine seaweed as one thing: long, green and wavy. But there are so many different kinds; seaweeds of all shapes, sizes and colours! British Columbia has an incredible amount of seaweed biodiversity; there are over 530 varieties right here on the shores of Vancouver! (Bates 2004). A member of the algae family, seaweed is classified into three groups: green, red, or brown.

“Seaweeds of the Pacific Northwest is a guide to identifying 25 common seaweeds that we can find right where we live. Some are edible, some are beautiful, all play important roles in Pacific Ocean ecosystems. Next time you’re at the beach, try finding as many different seaweeds as you can. See if you can classify it by looking at its colour: is it a Chlorophyta (green), Rhodophyta (red), or Phaeophyta (brown)?

“Seaweed isn’t really a “weed”, a better word might be sea-vegetable. Seaweed (or sea-vegetable; start the movement!) is super nutritious, full of vitamins, minerals and iron. Nori is an edible seaweed that is part of the Rhodophyta (red) family. After it is harvested, it is shredded, pressed and dried into thin sheets, similar to how paper is made. Here is a recipe using nori sheets as the base ingredient; you can use any combo of your favourite veggies and/or protein for the filling for these rolls!”

Nori Rolls Recipe Card

May we all be inspired by these waves of justice to do the work to care for the Earth and each other.

Kat

May 31, 2020 Leave a comment

Fresh Five: Marvelous Microbes!

Last week we talked a little bit about the tiniest inhabitants of our farms – the invertebrates, fungi, and bacteria that decompose plant and animal matter into the nutrients plants need to survive, which in turn become the nutrients we need to survive. But fungi and bacteria aren’t just breaking down the food in our compost, they are making the food in our kitchens and factories!

Like a lot of people, I took the ample time I’ve had in my home over the last few months to make a sourdough starter, and it’s been a wild ride figuring out how to develop and care for my own little colony of bacteria and yeasts (which are a type of fungus) so I can keep them happy and the use them to make some really delicious bread (and pancakes and crackers and biscuits and crumpets and…). Let’s just say, there’s been a lot of baking, and almost all of it has relied on microorganisms to happen.

And it’s not just breads. Fungi and bacteria are essential to making yogurt, cheese, sauerkraut, kimchi, soy sauce, chocolate, kombucha, tempeh, salami, and so much more. Humans have been employing the skills of bacteria and fungi to help us preserve foods for at least 13,000 years! So let’s raise a toast (fermented or not), to these marvelous microbes!

Here are five things to make to help you get to know our food microorganisms better.

Make it Rise

Uplifting Leavening Activity Guide

Make it Cultured

June 1 is World Milk Day! To celebrate both milk and microbes, there’s nothing better than yogurt! Yogurt is cultured, which in this case doesn’t mean it’s read all the books sitting on it’s “should read” pile. It means it’s a happy home to a number of strains of beneficial bacteria, which gives it it’s thickness and that tangy flavour. And best of all, it’s super easy to make at home! All you need is a pot, some jars, a food thermometer, milk, a little yogurt from the store, and a warm place. This recipe for the BC Dairy Association will get you started. It’s really great with the rhubarb compote from our Stems week!)

Make Your Own Yogurt

Make it for Science

Photo by Bev Sykes, CC BY 2.0

Sourdough is having a moment right now. But what is it? While most breads are leavened with baker’s yeast, which can be purchased in packets or jars in the grocery store, sourdough is leavened using a starter culture of wild yeasts and helpful bacteria. Those yeasts and bacteria live all around us, and will find a happy home in some flour and water in your kitchen. The fun thing about sourdough is that the exact strains of yeasts and bacteria are different in different places. You may even have different microbes in different parts of your house! These helpful yeasts and bacteria out compete and harmful ones.

Even if you don’t want to get into sourdough baking, you can still make a starter for science. Sourdough for Science is a citizen science project collecting information about sourdough starters around the world. You follow their instructions to make a starter and collect data for 10 days, then submit you data online!

Sourdough for Science!

Make it Fermented

So many every day foods rely on fermentation, even ones you’d never think of. Hot sauce? Fermented. Chocolate? Fermented. Tea? Fermented. Soy sauce? Cultured with mold and then fermented. Here are some fun videos showing how a few common foods are made. How many fermented foods do you eat?

How Soy Sauce is Made
How Tabasco Sauce is Made
Cocoa Fermentation

Make Kimchi

One of our most exciting community workshops is You Can Kimchi! where we talk about fermentation and it’s importance to food, and make a simple kimchi recipe. It’s messy, spicy, and a lot of fun!

I always start by admitting that I didn’t learn how to make kimchi from a Korean mom, grandma, aunt, or other cultural knowledge keepers. I learned from the internet, from someone who did learn from a Korean mom. And if you have a kimchi maker in your family, you should definitely reach out to them for teaching! Traditionally, kimchi was made collectively by groups of women in an extended family, as it’s had to make just a small batch. Traditional kimchi also includes seafood in the form of fish sauce or shrimp paste, but I’ve left it out of this version to make it more allergy-friendly.

The recipe may look like a lot of ingredients and a lot of steps, but none of them are difficult. Try your local Asian grocery store for the gochugaru (ground red pepper) if you can’t find it where you regularly shop. You could use a different kind of ground chiles, but it won’t quite be kimchi.

The Lactobacillus bacteria that give kimchi it’s crunch, fizz and tang come from the different ingredients in the mix, including the cabbage and gochgaru. Lactobacilli are anaerobic bacteria. That means they live and multiply where there’s no air. So for your kimchi to be kimchi, you need to use a mix of ingredients, and keep the air out by making sure your veggies are under the brine and there are no big air pockets in your jar.

Food Safety Note: While the lactobacilli are generally great at out competing for harmful fungi and bacteria, if your kimchi grows mold or smells bad, throw it out and don’t eat it!

Simple Kimchi Recipe Card

Happy Fermenting!

Kat

May 22, 2020 Leave a comment

Fresh Five: Biodiversity

Happy International Day for Biological Diversity!

You didn’t know May 22 was the International Day for Biological Diversity? That’s OK. Neither did I when I started planning this week’s Fresh Five to be about biodiversity. Talk about good timing! We couldn’t let this special day go by without acknowledgement, so your Fresh Five is coming early so you can celebrate IDB (as the cool kids at the UN call it) with activities to help you think about biodiversity in your neighborhood, on the farm, and in the world.

Biodiversity is, essentially, all the different kinds of plants, animals, fungi, and microorganisms in an ecosystem. Having a wide variety of living things in a ecosystem makes it more resilient and able to handle change. As humans, like all animals, we rely on other living things for food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and more, meaning that maintaining healthy ecosystems isn’t just about keeping the oceans healthy for whales or the forest healthy for moose (though whales and moose are important!). It’s also about keeping the world healthy for us.

Here are five ways to explore and celebrate biodiversity this week.

Make an Ecosystem Web

Fresh Roots grown (mainly) vegetables on our schoolyard farms. Our farmers plant rows of peas, squash, chard, lettuce, parsley, and more. We can grow nearly 100 different varieties of plants in a single season! That might sounds like a lot of biodiversity, but plants and farmers are just a small part of the whole biological picture. Discover how everything from crows to fungus to the air around us contributes to the biodiversity of our farm. We do versions of this activity with kids as young as 8 all the way through adults. (Hint – making the web is only the start of the discussion!)

Farm Ecosystem Web Activity Guide

Be a Biodiversity Detective

Biodiversity isn’t just on the farm, though – it’s all around us! This activity from VanDusen Botanical Garden will help you seek out the biodiversity in you yard, neighborhood, or local park. You might use it on a casual stroll, or make it a game and see how many different living things your can find in 10 minutes. And if you find something you don’t recognize, this could be great time to pull out the Seek app from our Earth Day Fresh Five.

Biodiversity Detectives Teacher Guide
Biodiversity Detectives Student Worksheet

Join the Bird Blitz

Working primarily from home for the last couple of months has given me more insight on my neighborhood birds. There is a family of European starlings who nest in my neighbor’s rafters every spring (and wake me up at sunrise every day). The black-capped chickadees love to hang out on the apple tree in the backyard. The house finches and sparrows mostly stay across the alley in the blackberries, but will sometimes come over if there’s any weeds that have gone to seed. Crows come by occasionally, and on special days the neighborhood ravens will fly over. Gulls like to sit on the roof of the church behind my house, and every once in a while, a bald eagle can be spotted soaring overhead. And that’s just in my urban backyard without any sort of bird feeder!

Do you like watching your backyard birds? Scientists want to know what you’re seeing! The Schoolyard Bird Blitz is an annual bird survey organized by Birds Canada to get students looking for birds, and contributing to scientific knowledge about the prevalence of bird species across Canada. This year, they’ve switch gears from a Schoolyard Bird Blitz to a Backyard Bird Blitz so everyone can participate!

Bird Blitz at Home!

Build a Crow’s Nest

Crows can be trouble on the farm. They love yanking out newly planted started to get at the insects and worms in the freshly turned soil, and they’ve even been know to pull the protective covers off our plant babies. They dig trash out of the trash cans and throw it everywhere. And if you’ve ever walked under a crow’s nest during baby season, you’ve likely been dive bombed by the protective parents. But crows are also extremely intelligent tool-users, and will build relationships with humans who treat them kindly. (They are still wild animals, so please don’t try to make your neighborhood crow into a pet!) And, just like humans and other animals, they have complex relationships with the biodiversity of their ecosystems.

This activity from Science World will get you thinking like a crow! As you build you nest, think about what other types of life are necessary for crows to build their nests.

Crows Nest Activity

Make a Biodiverse Salad

I’m so glad that my local farmer’s market is open again! It was worth waiting in the long, physical-distanced line to get my local eggs, veggies, and a pastry treat. It will be even more exciting when Fresh Roots’ produce is available but that’s still a few weeks away. One of the things I got recently was some of the first local kale. I eat a lot of kale, in smoothies, sauteed with eggs, in pasta or soup, or in salads. Raw kale can be… a lot. Massaging your kale with a little salt, fat, and/or acid for a few minutes starts the mechanical process of breaking down those tough cell walls, making it easier for your body to digest, and makes it less bitter.

And there are so many ways you can top your massaged kale! I like a little red onion, feta, dried cranberries, grated carrots, and candied pecans in the fall, and snap peas, crumbled goat cheese, fresh strawberries, and toasted sliced almonds in the spring. Just like biodiversity is good for ecosystems, biodiversity of foods is good for our bodies! Different foods have different balances of of the energy and nutrients our bodies need to thrive, so mix up your salads, and have fun!

Massaged Kale Salad Recipe Card

Get out and celebrate diversity!

Kat