There are many things that I love about teaching. One is that my students have terrific ideas and are enthusiastic about making them a reality, which lights a fire under me to try new things. Another is that I am on high alert for any program that will send us free stuff to use in the garden. I belong to many such organizations now, such as CalCAN, the California Agriculture and Climate Network, which provides helpful information and resources. Through them, I got a notice of a cover crop seed company (Green Cover Seeds) providing milpa seeds, for any organization that wanted to grow them, as long as some of the food it provided was given away to the community for free. We are already giving lots of greens to our school food bank, Merritt S.O.U.L. Food Pantry, so I knew that I could also contribute some of the produce from the milpa bed, in time. And, my students themselves eat what we grow, both taking extra home each day, and also they enjoy it at school (they make salads and smoothies every time we meet)!
Ok, so two things to share with you here: One, what the heck is a milpa garden? And two, what kind of bed did we build to house this garden?
A milpa garden is simply a bit like a three-sisters garden, based on indigenous knowledge of growing certain plants together. In the three-sisters case, it’s corn, beans, and squash. The corn grows tall, the beans twine up the stalks and also provide nitrogen to the soil, and the squash spreads out and covers the soil, preventing weeds and water loss. A milpa is a similar kind of idea. It’s also sometimes called a ‘chaos’ garden, because it’s lots of different seeds in one place. Above you can see how many different kinds of seeds were in this package! It’s fun to see which seeds are coming up and picture how the bed is going to look when it really gets going.
And speaking of the bed: My students wanted to build a hugelkulture bed, with logs and branches that we found on the property, as well as much of the contents of our compost pile. We dug a trench around the perimeter, then laid down cardboard to smother the weeds, then set the big logs in the trench, and lined the bottom with smaller logs and sticks. Then we carefully packed it with all the dry matter from our compost pile. Then we covered the whole thing with soil, watered it, and planted the seeds!
This is a birds-eye view (literally; my co-worker climbed a tree on the nearby hill to take this picture) of our garden space. You can’t see another space between the house and the barn on the left, which is where we have a bed of peas and a bed of potatoes, as well as an enormous pollinator garden. We got the seed for the pollinator garden from Pollinator Partnership, a local non-profit who I’ve been collaborating with for years. Below is a picture of some of the flowers coming up - native goldfields, tidy tips, and California bluebells! We are finally starting to see lots of bugs on the property. At the start, when this was just a weedy, abandoned place, we didn’t see any bugs at all.
It’s fun to try new things. One of my students was keen to build a keyhole bed, so we made a double keyhole using old slate that we found on the property (and took turns breaking up using a pick, the only tool we had that was somewhat appropriate), and planted our tomatoes in it. You can see that in the top photo up above the milpa bed.
It’s been tricky making a garden with very little money. Most of our budget has gone to buy soil, gloves and eye protection for the students, and seed. It’s very helpful to find these organizations who are willing to donate seed to a good cause. I’ve even had some friends give me seeds and starts and trellises (thanks B!) which has been terrific. Of course, it’s a good lesson to build an urban farm using only materials that are found on the property (we call this ‘scrappy farming’), so there’s definitely a silver lining to making do with less.