Yesterday was our very first student garden market!! It was a very exciting day! There wasn’t a whole lot ready to harvest, but we currently have lettuce coming out our ears, as they say, and if we don’t harvest it quick it’s going to bolt (flower and start tasting bitter and tough). So first thing this morning I went and harvested two bags of lettuce, and big bunch of chard, some basil, peppermint, and some of Mara’s snow peas and sugar snap peas and got them cleaned and in the cooler. We had DREAM in the garden again today so they helped make some lovely signs advertising our lovely vegetables. We brought it all over to down commons (the common space just below the dinning hall) and set up a small harvest table for the people in the MATSL program on campus right now as well as any other staff. We gave the food away for donations to the student garden, and actually brought in a fair amount of money.
Two of our DREAM kids manning the harvest table. (there's more lettuce than it looks like..
It all went very well. There were a few people who just brushed by assuming they had to cook the food and didn’t have the kitchen, or by saying they were leaving soon and couldn’t bring it with them. But once we started marketing the lettuce as “just bring it upstairs for lunch, it’s better than what they’re serving” people started to get the idea: fresh produce eaten fresh.
