Anyone interested in starting a school garden should read: “Getting Started: a Guide for Creating School Gardens”. The complete guide available for download from www.lifelab.org/store-curricula.html.

YVCC's school garden committee is currently working on winning support from rural Canyon Creek Elementary's Principal and School Board for developing a school garden there.

Here's an outline of the Guide's major points:

 Support from Principal (and School Board) necessary

 Ongoing involvement of teachers essential

 Basic goal for garden to be “owned and operated by students”

 Plan and implement community involvement and support strategy

 As important to involve teachers and students in garden design phase as in development and operation

 Keep track of progress in School Garden Journal

 Need summer strategies

 Fund part-time garden coordinator if at all possible

 Start small and build up over several years

Step 1: Go ahead from Principal and Board

Step 2: Design Phase

-recruit teachers for steering committee (plus community/parent reps, custodian)

-site selection (consider: 6 hours sunlight, drainage, water, accessibility, security)

-get an “ultimate” garden design proposal and map from each class which considers
class beds
common garden
special projects
outdoor classroom
composting (worms!) area
greenhouse or cold frame
storage for tools etc

-prepare a 3-year “consensus” development plan including maps

-work out elements of maintenance, volunteer and community outreach strategies

-obtain start-up tools, seeds and materials

Step 3: 3-Year Implementation Phase

YEAR ONE:
Lay out full garden design with stakes and twine, put up student-made
signs for everything planned, and mulch paths

Community Ground Breaking Day for Year 1 beds (or planters?), soil
preparation, planting, set up compost area

Write up & post year’s garden maintenance and class use schedules

Recruit volunteers and provide teaching/garden orientation workshops

YEAR TWO:
Add a Year 2 Community Ground Breaking Day for at least all class beds

Schedule maintenance, volunteers & volunteer orientation, class use

Host at least one community event--perhaps a harvest festival

YEAR THREE:
Add a Year 3 Community Ground Breaking Day to complete the garden design

Schedule maintenance, volunteers, class use, community event(s)

Hold brainstorming sessions on other garden–related activities (i.e. cooking classes,
school lunches, class fundraisers, expanded summer programs, experiments)

The threat posed to the promising local food movement by major federal food safety reform legislation was the subject of an informal meeting recently held between S. 510’s chief sponsor, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, Montana’s Senator Jon Tester and YVCC-Northern Plains members and staff.

The typical local food consumer knows that buying from non-industrial nearby sources is her best strategy for obtaining safe, wholesome food for her family. She may be personally acquainted with her suppliers or else buys at a local farmers’ market, grocery, food club or restaurant where others have direct knowledge of their local vendors’ production and processing practices. She knows that state and local requirements provide adequate public oversight of local suppliers. She understands that a lot of extra federal regulation and red tape would probably put her small, local producers out of business. In short, she (or he) is part of a local, non-bureaucratic response to food safety and quality concerns more effective than a whole building full of FDA regulators.

Billings Good Earth Market’s general manager, Perry McNeese, explained to Durbin what a hardship new FDA regulation would put on his dozens of local food suppliers. Extensive licensing, assessment, accounting, reporting and recall requirements add up fast both in money and time spent, and none of his area producers deal in enough volume to afford such extra costs. Besides, he has been hired by the Good Earth Market’s 5,900 member-consumers to serve as the store’s local food quality and safety watchdog among his other duties. Extra FDA regulation would be an unnecessary burden on his current local suppliers and be likely to kill off all interest in new start-ups vital to a healthy local food movement.

On the other hand, the conventional industrial-and-fast-food consumer is clearly isolated and helpless by herself. YVCC-Northern Plains members and staff voiced support for stronger federal oversight of the gigantic centralized industrial food system with its long supply chains and serious product mixing and amalgamation risks. Consumer-driven local food systems are organized to avoid those very problems, and an exemption for the kind of micro-businesses that supply them only makes common sense.

Montana Senator Jon Tester arranged the meeting with Durbin and participated himself along with several staff members. Tester has firsthand experience with local food suppliers’ economics since his family operated an on-farm custom butcher business in Big Sandy for many years. Durbin has a long standing interest in food safety ever since working in an East St. Louis packing house in his college days and to keep faith with a constituent who lost a child to e coli- contaminated hamburger.

At the meeting’s conclusion, Tester and Durbin agreed to team up to make S. 510 friendly to the local food movement with Tester volunteering to take the lead in working out appropriate local food supplier exemption language. We encourage everyone interested to contact Tester’s and Durbin’s DC offices about how “one size does not fit all” in food safety. Please let us know about any feedback you receive...by emailing charter@midrivers.com