This fall, Manhattan Country School students participating in the September and October farm trips to Roxbury will reap the bounty of gardens carefully tended by the kids at last summer’s Farm Camp. Students will get hands on with solar panels and may even witness the birth of a calf! There’s so much to look forward to this fall.
Here’s a look at our autumn farm trips:
Harvest time
The farm staff is preserving the corn, cucumbers, beans, broccoli and tomatoes for later use. The first few farm trips will no doubt find more tomatoes to harvest and broccoli to eat from the garden. There will be the underground crops: onions, carrots and potatoes for students to dig up, wash and cure in the sun or on racks in the greenhouse.
Several classes will leave the farm to harvest local fruit, such as blueberries or apples, and one group will go to Shaul’s farm stand in the Schoharie Valley to supplement our own fruits and vegetables with locally-grown produce.
Focus on energy
On or about the autumnal equinox, fifth floor students will engage in an important aspect of hands-on, renewable energy production. They will change our solar panels to their winter angle to capture the direct rays of the sun when it is low in the southern sky. By then we hope to be celebrating the installation of a special electric meter that will enable us to sell our excess energy to the power company, thereby helping us pay for our “green” energy production.
Eighth graders will begin research and discussion of the year’s environmental issue, which again focuses on drilling for gas in the Marcellus shale using a controversial method called “hydrofracking.” For their graduation requirement in Nature Studies, students will debate the ecology, economics and equity of this type of gas drilling.
Life on the farm
Students and staff seldom get to see an actual live birth. However, it’s likely the fifth floor students or the 8-9s class will get to witness the birth of Milky Way’s calf. Cows seem to wait until it is quiet – at night or even after the bus leaves on Friday – to give birth to their calves, so this would be a treat for students to watch.
The sixth grade will be introducing their new teacher Leevert Holmes to life on the farm, showing him all their favorite places, their chores in the house and barn, routines for meals and evening activities. In many of their classes, sixth graders will begin to show their mastery of farm processes that they will use in seventh and eighth grade to complete their graduation requirements.
Fun and games
The 8-9s class will get the opportunity to connect with their classroom curriculum about Native Americans by making games to play using natural materials, as Native children might have done long ago.
As part of our Catskills Folk Music Project, the 9-10s class will host folk musicians Ira and Laurie McIntosh who will share their “Catskills Tales and Tunes.” This is the last farm trip before Thanksgiving, so students will celebrate with a special harvest dinner.
Whether they harvest garden produce, participate in renewable energy prodstudy cook meals with farm-grown vegetables, meat, eggs, milk or syrup, MCS students all participate in the closed-loop food cycle at the Farm, where their food is as local as it can get.
Visitors at the farm
The Little Red Schoolhouse, the elementary school for Elizabeth Irwin High School, will send their third graders for two weeks in October. Children’s Workshop School, founded by former MCS teacher Jean Finnerty, will send their fourth graders for the final week in November before the farm closes for deer hunting season, which reopens in January 2011.
For more information about the farm, contact Ginny Scheer at farm@manhattancountryschool.org
