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Resource Overview

A visual demonstration that illustrates the limits on farmland, making the importance of conservation clear.

Students will be able to:

Describe earth's geography in terms of relative amounts of water, mountains, deserts, ice, developed land, and land available for farming.

Identify two reasons why protecting farmland and maintaining healthy soil is important for food production.

Name at least two ways people can help to preserve farmland.

Features of This Resource

Students consider risks to farmland, such as overfarming, erosion, and monoculture

Writing component - students write a letter to a local newspaper on the importance of preserving farmland

How Do I Get This Lesson Plan?

The resource is free. Click the green button for immediate download. Download Now

Pondering Pandas

Students participate in a simulation as giant pandas living in the wild to illustrate how population pressures impact the pandas'... Read more "

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Earth: The Apple of Our Eye (elem) - Population Education

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A visual demonstration that illustrates the limits on farmland, making the importance of conservation clear. Students will be able to: Describe earth's geography in terms of relative amounts of water, mountains, deserts, ice, developed land, and land available for farming. Identify two reasons why protecting farmland and maintaining healthy soil is important for food production.

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Resource Overview

Packet of Earth Day lesson plans for K - 5th grades. Free to download!

The 2020 Earth Day theme is "climate action." This lesson packet includes call-outs for climate connections, making it easy for you to provide climate action opportunities for your elementary students.
Don't teach elementary? Check out our Earth Day resource packets for Middle Grades and High School.

Features of This Resource

Engages elementary students with important questions like: How can we take action against climate change? How can we be sustainable even as our population grows?

Two lesson plans include direct climate action opportunities for elementary students

Fun and interactive lessons will make a memorable Earth Day

Included Lesson Plans and Readings

The following are include in the downloadable packet:

Lesson Plans

- Students estimate and verify the amount of green space necessary to meet the oxygen needs of the entire class and... Read more "

- In a role-playing simulation, students act as species in a habitat trying to survive by collecting cards that represent all... Read more "

- Students create handprint art and write an action they will take to protect the environment. Students will be able to:... Read more "

- By weighing and recording their lunch waste every day for a week, students learn how conservation efforts can reduce the... Read more "

- Through an interactive story, students learn how, as human populations have increased, many of our rivers have become polluted. Students... Read more "

Readings

- An elementary-level reading that addresses renewable and non-renewable resources.

How Do I Get This Lesson Packet?

The resource is free. Click the green button for immediate download. Download Now

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Earth Day Resources for Elementary Grades - Population Education

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Packet of Earth Day lesson plans for K - 5th grades. Free to download! The 2020 Earth Day theme is "climate action." This lesson packet includes call-outs for climate connections, making it easy for you to provide climate action opportunities for your elementary students. Don't teach elementary?

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Resource Overview

An elementary-level reading that addresses renewable and non-renewable resources.

How Do I Get This Reading?

This reading must be purchased as part of a lesson packet or as part of a full curriculum that is available in our store.

Nice to meet you!

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How do People Use the Earth's Resources? - Population Education

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An elementary-level reading that addresses renewable and non-renewable resources. Tell us a bit about yourself so we can continue creating resources that meet your needs. You'll only need to fill out this form once. If you've already completed the form, you can confirm your email here.

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Resource Overview

Students investigate how much water they use in their lives, both directly and indirectly.

Students will be able to:

Measure the amount of water they use on a daily basis.

Analyze their water use, both directly and indirectly.

Identify ways they can save water in their daily lives.

Features of This Resource

Template for a student-led water audit

Students collect and analyze their own data

Opportunity for public speaking

SEL core competency of responsible decision-making

How Do I Get This Lesson Plan?

This lesson plan must be purchased as part of a lesson packet or as part of a full curriculum that is available in our store.

What Would You Do?

In groups, students consider several environmental and social dilemmas and discuss the consequences of various reactions. Students will be able... Read more "

Waste A-Weigh

By weighing and recording their lunch waste every day for a week, students learn how conservation efforts can reduce the... Read more "

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You'll only need to fill out this form once. If you've already completed the form, you can confirm your email here.

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Every Drop Counts - Population Education

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Students investigate how much water they use in their lives, both directly and indirectly. Students will be able to: Measure the amount of water they use on a daily basis. Analyze their water use, both directly and indirectly. Identify ways they can save water in their daily lives.

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Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

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This unit introduces students to the food system and provides an important overview of the topics covered in Units 2 and 3. Students will map out all of the food system's interconnected parts, consider their own relationship to the food system, and explore how it developed into the industrialized model we know today.

Download the entire curriculum lesson plans, lesson plans with handouts, and lesson plans with handouts and slides.

Lesson A: Exploring Our Food System

The food system is a complex network that is deeply connected to health, society, and the environment. This lesson lays the groundwork for understanding food through an integrated, systems-thinking lens. Even if teachers only cover a few FoodSpan lessons, we recommend they first teach this lesson to give students a foundation.
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Lesson B: Industrialization of Agriculture

Agriculture has dramatically transformed over the last century. Using a timeline and short readings, students will explore key milestones in the history of agriculture, with a focus on industrialization and the reasons behind it.
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This unit introduces students to the food system and provides an important overview of the topics covered in Units 2 and 3. Students will map out all of the food system's interconnected parts, consider their own relationship to the food system, and explore how it developed into the industrialized model we know today.

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Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

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This unit explores how our food-from plants to animal products to seafood-is grown, harvested, processed, and distributed. Students will examine conventional industrial practices, explore sustainable alternatives, and consider the impact both have on human health and the environment.

Download the entire curriculum lesson plans, lesson plans with handouts, and lesson plans with handouts and slides.

Lesson 1: Crops: Growing Problems

Students will explore how crops are grown in industrial agriculture and how those practices impact human health and ecosystems. This lesson also covers the importance of soil, freshwater, and biodiversity in agriculture. In later lessons, students will learn in more detail about ecological alternatives to industrial crop production.
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Lesson 2: Animals: Field to Factory

Students will explore how animals are raised for food in the industrial system, and how it impacts human health and ecosystems. They will also look at ecological alternatives to industrial food animal production (IFAP)-such as pasture-based production-and consider the advantages and disadvantages of each system.
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Lesson 3: Seafood: Wild and Farmed

Students will explore how aquatic animals are harvested from the wild and farmed (aquaculture) and how those practices impact ecosystems. They will also consider health benefits and risks of eating seafood. Although seafood includes both aquatic plants and animals, the focus of this lesson is on fish and shellfish.
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Lesson 4: The Hands That Feed Us

At least one in six members of the U.S. workforce are employed in the food chain, from farm fields to food service. Students will identify different jobs, examine their working conditions, and consider how to improve workers' health and quality of life.
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Lesson 5: Our Changing Climate

This lesson allows students to zoom out and see how the food system is linked to a global issue: climate change. Students will learn about how climate change occurs, analyze the connections between climate change and agriculture, and consider ways to reduce the food system's greenhouse gas emissions.
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Lesson 6: Turning Toward Sustainability

Students will explore alternatives to the prevailing industrial model of agriculture and what it means for agriculture to be sustainable. They will examine agroecology as an approach to food production that nourishes, rather than depletes, natural ecosystems and human communities. They will imagine what a different agricultural paradigm could look like and share that vision with others.
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Lesson 7: Our Food's Journey

Food often travels thousands of miles from where it is produced to where it is sold and eaten. Students will learn why food is transported long distances and consider the advantages and disadvantages. Students will critically examine and debate different scales of food distribution (local, regional, national, and global).
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Lesson 8: Keeping Our Food Safe

Each year thousands of Americans experience foodborne illnesses caused by pathogens or biological toxins. Agricultural chemicals and additives in our food supply contribute to risks of chronic illnesses such as cancer. Students will explore how food becomes contaminated, the consequences for public health, and how to prevent and respond to food safety issues.
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Lesson 9: Processing: Farm to Factory

The development of different food processing techniques has sometimes improved and sometimes degraded the quality of food. Food processing offers important benefits to businesses and citizens, including a more varied food supply and foods with a longer shelf life. Certain aspects of food processing, however, raise concerns over nutritional quality, worker health, and food safety. Students will learn how food is processed and explore the positive and negative impacts of food processing techniques.
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Unit 2: Farmers, Factories and Food Chains

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This unit explores how our food-from plants to animal products to seafood-is grown, harvested, processed, and distributed. Students will examine conventional industrial practices, explore sustainable alternatives, and consider the impact both have on human health and the environment. Download the entire curriculum lesson plans, lesson plans with handouts, and lesson plans with handouts and slides.

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About ASAP

Growing Minds is a program of Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project. ASAP's mission is to help local farms thrive, link farmers to markets and supporters, and build healthy communities through connections to local food.

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Classroom Activity Accompanying Books Description Suggested Month Veggie Crowns Eating the Alphabet Introduce students to new fruits and vegetables. August Tomato Exploration Little Yellow Pear Tomatoes Introduce students to different varieties of tomatoes, how they grow, and how [...]

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Sign up or log in to save your favorite stories and lessons, create custom collections, and share with others.

When A Town Runs Dry documents life in Stratford, a small town in California's Central Valley. A farming community for over a hundred years, Stratford is suffering from a drought that is severely impacting the community, land, and residents' daily lives.

Currently in its sixth year of drought, the Central Valley is home to the country's most productive agricultural region, containing more than half of all the fruits, vegetables, and nuts grown in the United States. Some farmers are selling land and cutting back on farmed acreage, while others dig deeper wells to maintain crop yields. Groundwater in the area has significantly diminished due to over-use and according to the Los Angeles Times, the water table below Stratford fell 100 feet in two years. Residents are living without running water.

This film explores the drought through the eyes of three Stratford residents-a farmer, a shopkeeper, and a high school football coach. All three men prepare for an uncertain future.

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Sign up or log in to save your favorite stories and lessons, create custom collections, and share with others. When A Town Runs Dry documents life in Stratford, a small town in California's Central Valley. A farming community for over a hundred years, Stratford is suffering from a drought that is severely impacting the community, land, and residents' daily lives.

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"Every act of communication is an act of translation." Gregory Rabassa

I live on a farm that was once part forest, part swamp. I live with animals both domesticated and wild, with plants, with flowers, with a garden. My grandparents lived here, my parents, my siblings and I, and then my children too. I walk on the land every day and never get bored. There is always something new to see and learn. In the summer, I sit on my deck, which overlooks a pond, a field, and past that, the lake. Barn swallows nest over my head. Paper wasps build small grey cones among the swallow nests.

Once, I was sitting on my deck with a group of young people. A wasp came by to have a look. One young man looked up and exclaimed, "You have wasp nests up there." I do. My excuse to friends and family is these are nonaggressive paper wasps, not yellow jackets. But I wouldn't remove them in any case.

"All you have to do is sit still," I said. "They will come by to see who you are. After they know you, they won't bother you." This poor young man gave me a look that said, very clearly, "crazy lady." But, to his credit, he didn't move. There was so much more I wanted to tell him, but, where to start?

I wanted to tell him, "Just say hello." Some people proclaim, "The earth is alive," and while I sympathize with this statement, for me it is easier to say, "A wasp is alive." Or perhaps, "Grass is alive."

Grass is not only alive, it is responsive, and in its grass way, aware. Grass, mowed, turns into lawns, but given a chance, it will spring up and go wild in a very short time. It will cover sidewalks, parking lots, and walls. People rarely notice grass and yet they walk on grass all the time. They sit on it, lie on it. How many look down and see that the grass is alive?

Current research indicates that grass knows something. The smell of mown grass, which to the human nose seems so pleasant, is actually the smell of pheromones sent out by the grass. It is threatened, calling to pollinating insects. But we don't hear it as that because we don't know.

The grass is alive, I can say. But then I stop. What do I mean? Does the grass have consciousness, emotions, intelligence? I can't tell. How to translate the grass? The grass looks inert but it is always moving. It grows, changes, exudes pheromones, and sends out root tendrils that find cracks in the strongest concrete. If I lie on the grass, does the grass say hello back from within its grass aliveness?

I may never truly know but it doesn't matter. The realization of the aliveness of the non-human is the crack in the paradigm, a shift from understanding nature as passive, unfeeling, and mechanical, to seeing the non-human all around us as aware, a huge something in which we, as humans, participate but can never control, that we can study, become aware of, learn about and find many patterns of translation.
Grass is not only alive, it is responsive, and in its grass way, aware.
Everyday at our farm, this act of translation between human and non-human continues. A new horse lives at our farm. She is a rescue horse, a pretty red Arab mare that was neglected by her previous owner. I will never know what happened to her. When I come into the field, she turns her head away and won't look at me, unlike the other horses, who watch me, ears pricked to see if I am bringing treats, or hay, or a halter. She flinches at my touch and moves away.

So I am forcing this mare, Fannie Mae, to greet me. When I go out with her hay, I hold it until she looks at me and sniffs my hand. Then she turns her head away, lays her ears back, and won't eat unless I move off. I scratch her neck, I stand with her and breathe. Soften my own staring eyes so I lessen the predator messages my body is sending. I can interpret her behavior, but I can't really know what her experience is, or why she behaves this way. We have no shared language but I can interpret, guess, wonder, study, and learn her body language.

Eventually, I hope, she and I will figure things out on the basis of interpretation, body/sign language, and if I'm careful and aware, we can make an agreement on how to spend time together and be at peace.

My brother takes our dogs and hikes up the mountain every day. Often he follows the tracks of the female cougar who dens high on the mountains. Often he comes across a trail where she is following him. Sometimes they see each other.

She never comes down to the farm but we are glad to have her on the mountain. There are too many deer and not enough predators. We welcome her return as a sign of an ecosystem recovering itself. My brother believes she knows him and recognizes him.

Everywhere, in small ways, such translation continues. My daughter is an urban gardener. I'm a farmer. There's a difference, although we could argue all day about what it is. In her city garden, she planted her raspberries properly, out in the sun in good soil. But one plant reached up and across into the shadowed branches of her Gravenstein apple tree, and there it produced the earliest and fattest raspberries.
The realization of the aliveness of the non-human is the crack in the paradigm.
The assumption that plants and animals have no feelings was made by science, hundreds of years ago, for convenience. It's actually a cultural assumption. It has no scientific basis. This assumption makes it easier to experiment on animals, easier to exploit them, hunt them, or use them as a "resource." This kind of thinking has resulted in the snarled mix of contradictions, beliefs, sentimentality, superiority, and fear with which humans continue to regard and portray the non-human world.

But current research that examines plants and animals for 'intelligence' finds it in many new and surprising ways. Such research is finding that certain animals and plants are far more 'intelligent' than anyone had ever even guessed. However, intelligence is the wrong word. Consciousness is the wrong word. But science doesn't have the right words. We have no language because plants and animals are not like humans. Such comparisons are habitual but not useful.

Nevertheless, evidence continues to grow showing that animals are smarter than humans have ever understood them to be. Baboons can distinguish between written words and gibberish. Apes can delay instant gratification longer than a human child can. They plan ahead. They make war and peace. They perform acts that indicate caring. In fact, biologist Frans De Waal has written extensively on morality and empathy in primates and other animals.

It's not just primates that demonstrate unexpected abilities. Dolphins recognize themselves in a mirror. So do elephants. Black bears can count and so can pigeons, monkeys and ravens.

It's not just animals either.

In the words of botanist, Anthony Trewavas, plants can, "with great sensitivity compute complex aspects of their environment and change behaviour to optimize fitness within their local environment."

This means they communicate with each other through networks, warn other plants of danger, call for help, feed other plants, or put out pheromones to attract particular insects.

I can't really understand what goes on inside plants and animals. But I try to find out and to reach out, study, observe. Even still, I have to dwell in both the knowing and not-knowing, as listener and translator.

As a child, I was always fascinated by the many lives being lived on and around our farm: the domesticated animals we cared for and some of which we ate, or wild animals, some of which we made into pets. When I ranged over the mountainside above the farm, or along the lakeshore, I saw a variety of wildlife, from bears to hawks to ravens. Sometimes on hot afternoons, I would lie on the moss under giant Douglas firs, and part the bits of moss to see the small intense lives being lived underneath: tiny worms, beetles, larvae, or spiders.

But as an adult, more and more, I wonder about all these lives. I think about what it means to live somewhere and truly understand where I am living. The more I learn, the more complex it gets. I have always known that when I walked into the forest, voices, eyes, and ears announced my presence. Recent studies indicate that even the mighty fungi underground, mycelium, transmit my presence.

When I go into the forest, squirrels chitter from tree to tree to far away tree. Often a raven will ghost overhead, cock its head, and peer down. Now I am learning that scientific research has shown ravens can learn amazing skills, that a collie can learn over a thousand names, that parrots seem to understand what they are talking about, that plants can recognize and help each other, that an old growth tree acts as a mother tree to young trees, sending nutrients to their roots. How can I understand this? How do I acknowledge something so vast, so unknown?
It is bewildering to say simply, hello - to acknowledge the limits of translation, to acknowledge our own unknowing.
I have now been wandering around the same piece of land for some sixty years and now it's clear to me that the more I know about it, the farther away I am from understanding anything. That's okay by me. When I was eighteen I knew everything and now, all I know is that I don't know anything. I'd like to go back and re-read every book I ever read but I don't have time. I do have time, however, to watch and see and listen as I go for my daily walk.

On every walk now, a particular raven comes with me, appearing overhead or perching on a tree, silent, watching me. I stop to look, to recognize this presence. I don't know if it is a she or a he. Or why she or he comes on walks. But it does. Or they do. Yesterday there were a couple of ravens, clucking to each other in the dead craggy tree by the beach, combing beaks.

I am surrounded by beings whose behaviors, rightly or wrongly, I interpret. How do I find the invisible line between interpretation, anthropomorphism, and fantasy? My life is full of thorny ethical thickets. I keep domesticated animals. I even eat some of them. I ride horses. I work with dogs.

And when I watch animals, both domestic and wild, I interpret their behavior every day, trying to find the boundaries of a shared understanding. What do we share? Is it how our bodies move and communicate? Our senses? Plus we share land, we share an ecosystem, and I believe we share something else, a mutual recognition of being alive together.

I may think that animals don't understand my language but I have no full understanding of "them", what I perceive as them and no clarity about how they see me. How do I appear to them? Are they afraid of me? What language does my body exude as I wander across fields, up the mountain into the forest, in the midst of an astonishing exuberance of being, from tiny beetles to horses to cougars, from moss to giant cedar trees. Do I miss the messages and greetings coming back?

These new discoveries in science are saying look, plants and animals are different from what science previously assumed, which is different from what religions and culture have previously taught. The standard of "intelligence" or "culture" still remains a comparison with humans as ultimately superior in these areas.

Why not do research in the opposite direction? Making comparisons asks the wrong questions. Why not make the assumption that animals and plants have something; what do we call it? Aliveness? Awareness? Conscious existence? Proceed from there. Why constantly ask animals and plants, who can't speak our languages and who have no legal standing within our courts, to prove their intelligence, their consciousness, their equality with humans? After all, do animals acknowledge our superiority? Does the grass bow before us?

What kind of knowledge do they have of us? Over generations, ravens remember people who have harmed them. Do the whales remember whaling ships? Does the prairie remember our extermination of the buffalo?

The biggest, most profound and most revolutionary shift we could move to now is to live in a world where saying hello to the grass is a sign of deepest respect and an acknowledgment of our own lack of understanding and knowledge.

It is bewildering to say simply, hello - to acknowledge the limits of translation, to acknowledge our own unknowing. Our bodies also have a kind of language. Sometimes, our bodies translate for us, simply by being alive in the world, seeing, taking it in, and loving the place we have landed for now.

Yes, we are part of the world, and the world is within us as we are within an alive and enormous network of being that looks back at us. To perceive this is at once so profound and also simple. It begins with the most obvious everyday things around you. The most radical thing you can do is to look down, look around, say hello and then begin to learn what that means.
Photo by Luanne Armstrong

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"Every act of communication is an act of translation." Gregory Rabassa I live on a farm that was once part forest, part swamp. I live with animals both domesticated and wild, with plants, with flowers, with a garden. My grandparents lived here, my parents, my siblings and I, and then my children too.

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A book of river stories is, of course, an invitation to think about the relation between rivers and stories. It is also an occasion to think about the condition of the world's rivers, which we need urgently to do at this moment in the history of the human relation to the earth.

And a place to begin is with the obvious, with the fact that most of the life on earth depends on fresh water. The mineral earth with its dream shapes of mountain range and valley basin, desert and forest and taiga and prairie and butte and mesa, forged by the heat of the earth's core, scoured by the advance and retreat of glaciers, terminated by coastal cliffs and beaches of sand or shingle, is intricately veined with the flow of it. The story of our relation to it begins, I suppose, with pieces of bone excavated along the Awash River in Ethopia and a piece of a jaw excavated beside an ancient lake in Kenya. Ardipithecus ramidus and Australopithecus anamemnsis: they are about 4.4 million years old. At one point eight million years ago, a welter of hominid species foraged the edges of the same lake. And among them, most likely, were our ancestors. Human life probably developed within easy range of lakes and rivers. Human civilization-at the Tigres and Euphrates, the Ganges, the Yangtze, and the Nile-certainly did.

Human beings must first have used rivers for drinking and bathing and for food, fishing the shallows and hunting the birds and mammals drawn to the banks for water. It was probably fishing and hunting on floating logs that led to boat-making, and boat-making must have increased enormously the mobility of the species. Agriculture developed in the rich deposits of the flood plains. And these sedentary toolmakers were soon harnessing the power of the water with mill wheels and dams. Irrigation, as a technology, is about three thousand years old. It will tell you something about the stress human beings have put on river systems in the last hundred years of this history if you know that in 1900, 40 million hectares of cropland were under irrigation world-wide. Forty million hectares in three thousand years. By 1993, 248 million hectares were under irrigation.

It's also a fact of the twentieth century that as a mode of travel, for commerce and pleasure, rivers have been largely displaced by highways, railways, and air travel. A hundred and fifty years ago the epic stories of engineering had to do with canal building, connecting one river system or one sea with another: Panama and Suez. The locks of the Erie Canal and the extensive lock system of English rivers belong now to a quaint and minor tourism. The stories of the twentieth century have had to do with massive dams, with nationalism and economic development and the prestige of massive dams. Rivers now supply 20 percent of the world's electrical power, most of it generated by large, ecologically destructive, often culturally destructive, dams. The still-to-be-completed Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze is only the latest in a series of Faustian bargains technological culture has struck with the rivers of the earth.
Rivers, of course, are like stories
Though the names are still magic-Amazon, Congo, Mississippi, Niger, Plate, Volga, Tiber, Seine, Ganges, Mekong, Rhine, Colorado, Marne, Orinoco, Rio Grande-the rivers themselves have almost disappeared from consciousness in the modern world. Insofar as they exist in our imaginations, that existence is nostalgic. We have turned our memory of the Mississippi into a Mark Twain theme park at Disneyland. Our railroads followed the contours of the rivers and then our highways followed the contours of the rail lines. Traveling, we move as a river moves, at two removes. Our children don't know where their electricity comes from, they don't know where the water they drink comes from, and in many places on the earth the turgid backwaters of dammed rivers are inflicting on local childen an epidemic of the old riverside diseases: dystentary, schistosomiasis, "river blindness." Rivers and the river gods that defined our civilizations have become the sublimated symbols of everything we have done to the planet in the last two hundred years. And the rivers themselves have come to function as trace memories of what we have repressed in the name of our technical mastery. They are the ecological unconscious.

So, of course, they show up in poetry. "I do not know much about gods," T. S. Eliot wrote, who grew up along the Mississippi in St. Louis, "but I think that the river is a strong brown god." "Under various names," wrote Czeslaw Milosz, who grew up in Lithuania along the Neman, "I have praised only you, rivers. You are milk and honey and love and death and dance." I take this to be the first stirrings, even as our civilization did its damming and polluting, of the recognition of what we have lost and need to recover. When human populations were small enough, the cleansing flow of rivers and their fierce floods could create the illusion that our acts did not have consequences, that they vanished downstream. Now that is no longer true, and we are being compelled to reconsider the work of our hands. And, of course, we are too dependent on our own geographical origins to have lost our connection with them entirely.

Traveling in the world, even now, we confront, one way or another, the human history of rivers. Several times in the last few years I've arrived in a foreign city, and gone to sleep in a hotel room, and awakened to look out the window at a river. The first time was in Budapest. The river was the Danube. I woke up just before sunrise, walked out onto a balcony, and in the cold air at first light, looked out across the Pest hills and the first glimmerings of day on the broad, mud-colored water. The smell of it was in the air. I realized that I didn't know much of its geography. I knew that it originated somewhere in the Alps, flowed east across southern Germany-the Nibelungenleid consists of Danube river tales-and south from Vienna through Hungary and then southeast again through Serbia, emptying into the Black Sea somewhere south of Odessa. I seemed to recall, vaguely, that the poet Ovid, when he offended Caesar Augustus, had been exiled to a half-wild garrison town at the mouth of the Danube. And I knew that a few years before, a particularly mindless plan to dam the river as it flowed across central Hungary had become so controversial that the government outlawed public discussion of the project by scientists.

The lights were going out on the bridges, I could make out the dim forms of a few barges on the river, and a voice drifted toward me on the wind. There must have existed and perished in five thousand years whole dictionaries of river slang in half a dozen different languages, Magyar, and several German and Slavic dialects, and whatever hybrid Romanian is. There must once have been a Romano-Serb or a Romano-Germanic river pidgin spoken by merchants and boatmen the whole length of it. And it may have been in Roman times that it acquired its common name, since the Romans were great makers of maps, though it had probably been, long before any legions marched along its banks, a local god in many different cultures, with many different names. I knew of one poem, by the Belgrade poet Vasko Popa, that addresses Father Danube in a sort of Serbian modernist prayer. Belgrade- belo grad -means "white city" in Serbian:
O great Lord Danube
the blood of the white town
Is flowing in your veins If you love it get up a moment
From your bed of love- Ride on the largest carp
Pierce the leaden clouds
And come visit your heavenly birthplace Bring gifts to the white town
The fruits and birds and flowers of paradise The bell towers will bow down to you
And the streets prostrate themselves
O great Lord Danube
I did not bow down. I found myself instead up to my neck in the comedy of consumer travel. I had called room service and ordered coffee the moment I woke. It arrived in a silver pitcher with a cream-colored china cup and a saucer with a fluted rim. I poured the coffee and then thought to check the bill. As near as I could tell, it was going to cost me $30, and this occasioned in me mild panic. The staff spoke English; I considered calling them and telling them there had been a mistake; I didn't require what the menu called a "morning beverage," after all. The problem turned out to be my arithmetic. The coffee was $3-but when I went back out onto the balcony and sipped the coffee, which smelled like wine and unripe berries and dark earth, and watched the Danube turn silver in the dawn. I thought I was drinking a $30 pot of coffee. It was a kind of offering to the river god.

The second time I looked out such a window the river I saw was the Huangpu. I had also come into Shanghai in the dark. This time I woke to a pearl-grey morning hazy with river mist. The river itself was teeming with traffic-barges, sometimes two or three together, linked by thick cables, carrying lumber, sacks of cement, girders, building tiles; tankers low in the water, ploughing against the current; tugs; packed ferries; a few sailboats; other ancient and non-descript vessels. In five minutes I counted eighty going and coming. The water was grayish-brown, foaming against the embankments, quays, warehouses, and docks. Just below me a crowd of people and bicycles was queuing for one of the ferries. Across the river was the Bund, the old commercial street of the pre-World War II city with its European-style bank and insurance buildings and hotels in the shapes of Greek and Roman temples, old coal-smoke-darkened marble columns and domes. Shanghai, I learned later, is a relatively modern city. In the fourteenth century, the Bund had been a tow-path for river barges above a reedy wetlands and a small fishing village. The village became a town in the sixteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth, it might have been the commercial riverfront of any European river city-Lyon or Glasgow or Amsterdam.
The river, for all its human vitality, was dead.
The street at that hour was already aswarm with the flow of human traffic and it seemed to mimic the movement on the crowded river. It was as if I were looking out not at another continent but another time. The river was a nineteenth-century river, thick with the traffic that had elsewhere in the world been transferred to trains and air freight, and sixteen-wheel trucks. The Bund-most of the buildings dated from 1880 to 1920-was a living memory of the forms of European piracy that came to be called "the Age of Empire." I half expected to see Joseph Conrad emerge from one of the buildings in his Edwardian beard, carrying a commission to captain a steamer up the Congo. But the scene also looked like a Chinese scroll painting, as if the jagged line of Maoist-era apartment buildings in the distance were mountains, and the river-mists the half-remembered forms of local and dynastic gods, and the river itself an allegory of human life: provision and supply, upriver struggle and downriver flow, and human crowds coming and going in a smudged and dreamy haze.

There was also something unsettling about the scene, and it was not until later in the day, as I was wandering around the city, that it dawned on me what I had seen. Or not seen: I turned abruptly around and traced my way back to the river, leaned against the embankment, and stared a long time. There were no birds. Not a single gull, no ducks, no herons or egrets. Not a cormorant or a grebe. There were not even sparrows or songbirds in the spindly trees in the riverside park. And there was not a fisherman in sight. The river, for all its human vitality, was dead.

The third river was the Nile. Even at night, from my room at the Semiramis in downtown Cairo, there was no mistaking it, though I couldn't make out that fabulous stream itself. Laughter, some of it good-natured, some of it hilarious, floated up to my window. Brilliant lights all along the riverside seemed to mark bridges and a promenade and open-air cafés. And there was the smell of it, even in the humidity and auto exhaust, green and cool. It was there in the morning, in the unbelievable din of Cairo traffic-it seemed in Cairo that not honking one's horn was the exception rather than the rule-and even in all that noise it looked peaceful: greenish water; a strong, gentle current; reeds; palms; bankside banyans with their broad gleaming leaves; and, as if conjured from a late eighteenth century water color, the red lanteen sails of the felluccas, skimming upriver in a following breeze.

Nilus is probably no older than any other of the discontinued river gods, but he is older in the human imagination, a fact that was demonstrated to me the next day when, quite unexpectedly, I ran into an old friend in the hotel lobby, an American woman living in London. She was in Cairo for one day only. She was about to get into a cab to go have a look at the Ben Ezra synagogue, the oldest in the city, which she needed to be able to describe in a novel she was working on. On an impulse I joined her. The cab driver assiduously honking his horn so that we could only communicate in shouts, we threaded our way through the streets. The previous day had been an Islamic holiday, celebrated by a daylong fast, followed by the butchering of a live animal at sunset, goat or sheep, and a feast-to commemerate, we had been told, the sheep sacrificed by Abraham when the Lord God spared the life of his son Isaac, once Abraham had established his willingness to kill his own son for this deity. It meant that the corners of the Cairo streets were stacked with the still-bloody pelts of skinned animals, in which the flies were conducting their own festival, and that, once we were out of the car, in what is called Old Cairo to distinguish it from the other old Cairo, the Islamic city of the middle ages, the cobblestones were slick with reddish or tea-colored puddles where the blood had been washed from the streets. We made our way across the street gingerly; wandered down an alley out of the novels of Mahfouz, which smelled of mint tea and apple-wood smoke from tiny cafés; and came to the open courtyard of the synagogue, which was closed.

My friend had to settle for a description of the exterior of the building. A man rose from one of the café tables across the square and approached us, gestured solemnly with two raised fingers for us to follow him, which, somewhat hypnotized, we did. He took us around to the other side of the building, where, in a garden of palms and what looked like antique fuchsias, there was a well, covered with ornate ironwork. "Here," he said, "Moses was found in the bulrushes." We both balked. "Here?" "Oh, yes," he said-within a few days I was to understand that the city was full of these scholars of local legend-"this was the old channel of the river. It flowed straight through here. Moses was a Cairo boy." There was no Cairo in Pharaonic times, but Memphis was only thirty miles upriver, and the river did once flow this way, so who was going to argue the point? Not far from the synagogue is Babylon, a ruin-a wall of brick and rubble-of the Roman fort from which the city of Cairo grew. A renegade band of Persian army deserters had established a settlement there in the sixth century B.C., and their fort, later, in Trajan's time, came to serve as the foundation of the Roman fort. Memphis and the Saqqarah pyramids were just twelve miles south. And if the infant of a Jewish slave had been placed in a basket made from the wicker of river reeds, it may very well have floated downriver to this spot. The probability, at least, would have invited the legend, and it is quite possible that some of the descendants of those Jewish slaves were among the founders of a holy place inside the walls of the abandoned Roman fort that had turned it into an enclave of Jews and Coptic Christians two thousand years ago.

The Aswan High Dam, built in the 1960s by the Nasser regime as a monument to national independence, has had the unintended consequence of eating away the foundations of these old buildings. The dam captured the flow of nutrient-rich silt that created Egyptian civilization so that it was no longer deposited downstream and made farmers dependent on chemical fertilizers. The backed-up waters spread schistosomiasis through the communities of the Upper Nile and allowed the Mediterranean, as it seeped inland against the weakened current, to wash away almost entirely the Nile delta and its lucrative fishery, and the diversion of water to marginally arable lands forced the city of Cairo to draw down its freshwater aquifers. The result is that the salts underground are rising and eroding the foundations of Cairo's ancient mosques, churches, and some of the pyramids themselves.
A starting place for this work would be to recover an elder imagination of the earth.
Hard to see how this does not spell pure catastrophe, but for now at least the Nile is still alive. The next day I went to Saqqarah. The tombs of Ti and Ptah-hotep are full of images of life along the river-fishermen with their nets and narrow boats above a world of teeming fish, each kind rendered with extraodinary exactness-and there were scenes of bird-catching in the marshes, the birds so exactly rendered that it was easy to pick out species at a glance. One caught my eye because it seemed unfamiliar; it looked like a humpbacked crow. Driving back to town along the river, I thought I saw the same silhouette in the intense green of the river reeds. We stopped the car. "Do you know what that is?" I asked the Cairene friend who was driving. "I think it's called a hooded crow," she said. "They're all over the place, and they're really noisy." I looked again, a black shape humpbacked against the green of the river, the precise outline that the artist's hand had rendered, as if forty-five hundred years had washed by in an instant.

Most of our rivers are still alive, and they are immensely resilient. It now seems possible that human civilization can begin to undo the damage it has done in this last century. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbit, symbolically perhaps, has begun to decommission some American dams. The technology and the understanding of flood dynamics and of the need for water conservation have begun to make the twenty-first-century work of river restoration seem a possibility. A starting place for this work would be to recover an elder imagination of the earth. That is one of the reasons why we need stories about rivers, and why The Gift of Rivers has such intense resonance.

Rivers, of course, are like stories, and they are like stories that classical strictures on form would approve. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In between, they flow. Or would flow, if we let them. It's interesting to consider the fact that, in popular culture, in commercial television, what's happened to rivers has happened to stories. A dam is a commercial interruption in a river. A commercial is a dam impeding the flow of a story: it passes the human imagination through the turbine of a sales pitch to generate consumer lust. So it might be useful to remember, as you read this book and think about the rivers of the earth and about the task of reclaiming them that lies before us, that what you are reading are narratives without commercial interruptions-which is good for the health of rivers and narrative art.

Note: An account of the Nagymoros Dam campaign in Hungary and of the building of the High Aswan Dam and some of its consequences can be found in Patrick McCully, Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams ( London, Zed Books, 1996).

2000
Published in What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World by Robert Hass

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A book of river stories is, of course, an invitation to think about the relation between rivers and stories. It is also an occasion to think about the condition of the world's rivers, which we need urgently to do at this moment in the history of the human relation to the earth.

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Setting the Stage

Introduce the story by telling students that they will be reading an article written by a farmer who has a nontraditional take on the emotional and intellectual capacities of nonhuman animals and plants. Ask students: How many of you think nonhuman animals possess intelligence and experience emotions? How many of you think plants possess intelligence and experience emotions? What evidence do you have for your position?

Engaging with the Story

Point out that scientists have long assumed that plants and nonhuman animals don't really have consciousness, or, as the author puts it, that nature is "passive, unfeeling, and mechanical." However, there is a bounty of new research that raises questions about that assumption. Invite students to read the story, underlining the various animals and plants the author offers as examples challenging that notion.

Delving Deeper

1. After they read the story, give students a few minutes to jot down thoughts about their own relationships with animals or plants, and whether they have had any experiences that would support or refute the author's thesis.

2. Lead a discussion with your class about the article, asking such questions as:

The author has over 60 years of experience living and working on a farm. From your own experience, would you agree or disagree with her perspective that plants and nonhuman animals are capable of awareness?

If she were proved right, how might that change your behavior toward plants and animals? How might it change our culture or society?

The author uses the word "translation" to describe her communication and connection with other living things. How might this word contribute to a new or deeper understanding of human-animal or human-plant relationships?

Reflecting and Projecting

Give students the following reflective writing prompt to demonstrate their understanding of the story:

In the article's opening quote, Gregory Rabassa says, "Every act of communication is an act of translation." After reading the article, write a paragraph describing what you think Rabassa means in this statement and how it relates to the article. (CCSS.ELA.RH.11-12.4)

Resources

Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: Guide to the Senses A Field (New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).

Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society (New York: Broadway Books, 2010).

Stephen Budiansky, If a Lion Could Talk (New York: Free Press, 1998).

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Setting the Stage Introduce the story by telling students that they will be reading an article written by a farmer who has a nontraditional take on the emotional and intellectual capacities of nonhuman animals and plants. Ask students: How many of you think nonhuman animals possess intelligence and experience emotions?

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Our farming philosophy starts beneath the surface, with an emphasis on cultivating a properly balanced soil ecosystem.

If all of our soil elements are in balance with one another (just like the human body) our soil life will thrive and all we have to do is put plants in the ground and watch them grow into nutritionally dense, life giving food. We do not put synthetic nutrients into our soil and we do not apply synthetic substances to our plants to keep away pests. Instead, we aim for a balanced soil and beneficial insect attractants to maintain a healthy ecosystem where plants can thrive.

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Located in Scotts Hill, NC, we provide the local area with seasonal produce, fresh cut flowers, pasture raised eggs and poultry, pasture-forest pork, and seasonal turkeys. Our farming philosophy starts beneath the surface, with an emphasis on properly balanced soil chemistry.

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Located in Holly Ridge, NC, we raise our pigs and chickens with the philosophy that they should be able to mimic and act on their natural tendencies!

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Black River Organic Farm
Stefan Hartmann
4457 Ivanhoe Road, Ivanhoe, NC
More information

Black River is owned and operated by Stefan Hartmann on family land on the Black River in Sampson County. Each season, a selection of traditional and heirloom vegetables are grown on this 16 acre certified organic farm using time tested growing methods to provide the highest quality and greatest taste. Stefan distributes at several regional farmers' markets, sells wholesale to restaurants and organic produce distributors. The farm is run with help from an exceptional seasonal staff that lives and works on the farm. Fresh produce is packed and shipped with care and speed, to deliver delicious produce from the field to your table at the peak of flavor and freshness. For fifteen years, Black River has been committed to producing the best organically grown vegetables in the area.

Products: Seasonal vegetables
Growing practices: Organic

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Black River Organic Farm Stefan Hartmann4457 Ivanhoe Road, Ivanhoe, NC More information Black River is owned and operated by Stefan Hartmann on family land on the Black River in Sampson County. Each season, a selection of traditional and heirloom vegetables are grown on this 16 acre certified organic farm using time tested growing methods to provide the highest quality and greatest taste.

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ABOUT OUR FARM

To be closer to the land, the idea of growing the herbs that were not so readily available locally, evolved into the idea of starting a home-grown business. Inspired by national trends and increased interest in herbs for food and health, Margaret Shelton began her agricultural journey with just a few dozen herbs the first year, in 1986.

Shelton Herb Farm is open year-round with plants for the changing seasons. The Farm participates in several local Farmers' Markets, as well as seasonal plant sales both locally and away.

Our fresh-cut herbs are sold to local restaurants and caterers.

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Herbs Flowers Soil Gardening | Shelton Herb Farm | United States

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We sell fresh herbs, flowers, vegetables, honey and more to everyone including, restaurants, farmers, home gardeners, master gardeners and community gardens across the state! Stop by for an afternoon of pastoral peace and cultivate your greenest desires or just check out the chickens!

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Red Beard Farms
Morgan Milne
5258 Horse Branch Rd., Willard, NC
Facebook / Instagram

Morgan Milne opened Red Beard Farms in 2014. A Carolina Beach native, Morgan Milne graduated from NC State with a degree in horticulture where his interest in farming and permaculture came into fruition. "I spent a lot of time in the arboretum at college and became fascinated with the variety of plants," he said. Red Beard Farms has 7 acres of fields and 9 acres of woods. Morgan grows vegetables, mushrooms, raises chickens, and dabbles in pork, but he doesn't do it all alone. Morgan has seasonal help, as well as a full-time assistant year around. He distributes through markets, CSA, Port City Produce and Humble Roots Buying Club, a CSA alternative. "It started as 'Yay! Let's feed people' Now, I just wanna grow vegetables."

Products: Seasonal vegetables
Growing practices: Pesticide-free

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Red Beard Farms Morgan Milne5258 Horse Branch Rd., Willard, NC Facebook / Instagram Morgan Milne opened Red Beard Farms in 2014. A Carolina Beach native, Morgan Milne graduated from NC State with a degree in horticulture where his interest in farming and permaculture came into fruition.

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Wilmington's most trusted source for local and organic groceries, bulk foods, deli, and smoothies, as well as vitamins and supplements backed by a knowledgable staff

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A film by award-winning California filmmaker, commercial director and conservationist Shawn Bannon.

"In 2019, scientists discovered that several trees in Eastern North Carolina's Three Sisters Swamp are over 2,000 years old; one is at least 2,624 years old. Located in a remote section of the Black River, the grove of trees is among the less than 1 percent of remaining virgin bald cypress forests in the United States. It's a miracle these beautiful trees have escaped the axe for millennia--but could industrial agriculture threaten the ancient swamp's future? Join us as we take a special tour of the Three Sisters Swamp with Cape Fear Riverkeeper Kemp Burdette."

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Cape Fear River Watch | Keeping an Eye on the River.

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A film by award-winning California filmmaker, commercial director and conservationist Shawn Bannon. "In 2019, scientists discovered that several trees in Eastern North Carolina's Three Sisters Swamp are over 2,000 years old; one is at least 2,624 years old.

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Children love dirt! Gardening is a perfect excuse to get dirty! Gardening is one of the major parts of Practical Life activities children learn to master in the Montessori environment. In addition to presenting amazing health benefits, gardening allows children to be engaged in the process that does not produce an immediate result. This teaches children to be patient and provides an incredible feeling of accomplishment allowing them to fully enjoy fruits of their labor.

Many mothers have difficulties making their kids eat vegetables. A surefire method to address this difficulty is to make kids grow their own vegetable. Your own vegetable garden may be too challenging for your kid to handle. So, how to make a vegetable garden for kids.

Kids always enjoy staying outdoor. They love to run in the garden, climb trees, digging dirt and even watering your lawn and garden. Children are always curious about everything about nature, too.

Why a vegetable garden? Vegetables germinate and grow quickly and they can be immediately eaten after harvesting. With that said, your kid will enjoy having his own vegetable garden, planting seeds, watching them sprout and grow, watering, cultivating, adding organic fertilizer and finally harvesting their own produce and eating them.

Having his own vegetable garden will also teach your kid some responsibility. It will also enhance their self-esteem. To allow your kid to take advantage of the many benefits of having his own vegetable, it should be planned well.
#1. Find an area that is accessible and suitable for your kid.
Ensure it gets a lot of sunlight and is near a water source and has the best soil.  You want to make sure that your kid's garden has all the essentials that will make a successful vegetable garden. You can create a small plot in your garden or even a sandbox.

You can position your kid's vegetable garden near your own garden. The best location though is in his play place where he can pick a vegetable to eat while playing.
#2. Allow your child to choose the layout for his vegetable garden.
It does not necessarily have to be the usual rectangular shape.

A small plot or sandbox converted into a garden bed will provide your kid with a sense of ownership and the responsibility that goes with it. It can also be a garden consisting of beautifully designed pots which your child chose. Your kid may also opt for a small garden bed. A round vegetable garden with divisions for different plants can also be fun and exciting.

Encourage your kid to use his creativity in designing his vegetable garden so it becomes uniquely his own. To add color and excitement your kid's vegetable garden, you can help him plant some colorful flowers such as sunflowers and marigolds.

Do not place a fence on your kid's vegetable garden. If it needs to have a fence, build one which your kid can easily open his own.
#3. The soil you have in your yard may be used for your kid's vegetable garden.
Make sure though it is free of weeds and insects that can harm seedlings. Make sure too that it is rich in nutrients.

Using a soil mix is the best for your kid's vegetable garden because they are already a mixture of fertilizer, vermiculite, compost, topsoil and peat moss. Remember that everything in your kid's vegetable garden should endure its success.
#4. Choose the right kinds of vegetables to plant.
To get your kid excited about his vegetable garden is to have him plant vegetables that are easy to grow. You want your kid to have a successful vegetable garden and it helps a lot if you guide him to choose the right vegetables. Here are some easy to grow veggies perfect for your kid's vegetable garden:
Tomatoes | Cabbage | #5. Allow your lid to use real tools and not plastic garden tools. Beets | Beans | #6 Have your kid start planting his vegetable seeds during the early spring. Peas | #7. Have your kid use a plant mister to water his young seeds. Strawberries | Eggplants | Squash Cherry tomatoes | Radish | Broccoli | Carrots | Cucumber
It may be a challenge to find real tools that are safe for kids to use. Small garden gloves are not easy to find. Real spades or hoes with short handles on the other the other hand are easy to find.

By using real tools, your kid will feel that you are giving importance and appreciating his work on his vegetable garden.

It is also best to have your kid start planting indoors. The seeds have better chances of growing successfully because exposure to the sun, water and temperature are better controlled than when they are planted directly to the soil. It also allows your kid to start his vegetable garden even during winter or autumn.

He can start using a watering can when seeds start to mature.

When you are preparing a vegetable garden for your kid, make sure to only use things that will ensure its success. When he starts harvesting he will be eating vegetables he himself planted and nurtured.

Have you helped your kids with a vegetable garden? Has your kid been eating his vegetables with so much gusto? Share with us your thoughts in the comments section. You may also wish to share this article with some of your fellow moms.

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Children love dirt! Gardening is a perfect excuse to get dirty! Gardening is one of the major parts of Practical Life activities children learn to master in the Montessori environment. In addition to presenting amazing health benefits, gardening allows children to be engaged in the process that does not produce an immediate result.

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By Barbara J. Sullivan * Photographs by Mark Steelman

Sometime within the last decade, the pundits began talking about silos, those grain storage facilities which the vast majority of Americans only glimpse while speeding by on a stretch of rural highway. Silos have become the new metaphor to describe what's happened to our country - groups and subgroups living apart in their own realities, unable to understand or communicate effectively with one another.

The current wisdom is that our silos are constructed on political beliefs, economic status, religion, race, gender, age, ethnicity - and maybe even who you were rooting for on Game of Thrones. Possibly it's as bad as they say. Maybe the nation has always suffered gaping divides which are just now getting more attention. But the truth is, a person with an open mind, a positive outlook and a lot of determination can have friends from every part of town and across every border of class, race, socioeconomic status, age or belief system. In Wilmington, North Carolina, David Brenner is just such a person.
URBAN FARM
It's fitting that Brenner's particular obsession, and the thing that's led him to connect with all and sundry people, is community gardening. Yes, he creates impressive numbers of vegetable plots in neighborhoods all around town, but in the other sense of the phrase "community gardener" he's also a cultivator of people and of communities. Without hesitation he rushes headlong to meet the next person who will become his friend, his collaborator, his partner in this vivid vision he has. It might be a sheriff's deputy working with at-risk youth, the pastor of a church or a group of self-described free-thinkers, agnostics and atheists. It might be a leading local banker, real estate agent, architect or a longtime community activist who hosts a daylong block party every year for her neighbors struggling to make ends meet.

Brenner is as comfortable with the mayor as he is with a gaggle of sixth-graders. He careens between non-English-speaking Burmese refugees and hospital surgeons, the very young, the very old, those who live in wealthy neighborhoods and those who cultivate their plots in public housing common areas. He literally shuttles all over town meeting with folks who have come to love him and what he does. He's been described as "the Mr. Rogers of gardening," possibly because of his unrelentingly positive attitude or that slightly mischievous smile in his eyes inviting you to join him in his next adventure.

"I was always a workaholic and never did anything for the community," he says. After retirement, he began volunteering for the Master Gardener program at the New Hanover County Arboretum and from there was smitten by the idea of creating sustainable community gardens. Back in 2014, when he got started, the idea wasn't new. Volunteers from various nonprofits and churches had planted gardens around town but, sadly, most had withered from lack of water, or exploded into a jumble of chickweed, fescue grass and vetch from lack of attention.

As Brenner embarked on his mission, he was sobered by the thought that school gardens might peter out in the summer months, when students and teachers were not there to administer TLC; gardens without a permanent water source might well suffer from drought; and if the one devoted curator of a particular neighborhood garden were to die or move away, the once luxuriant plot would revert to a weed patch within months.

FIRST CHRISTIAN CHURCH GARDENS

Before retiring, Brenner had worked as a mechanical engineer. His first gardening inspiration came from his mother, one of seven children raised on a farm in South Carolina during the Depression who at age 11 took over most of the job of running the family household. She stood on a chair to cook and raised a windowsill-full of peppers and tomatoes in Dixie cups. From the bounty of her 20-by-50-foot garden, she canned beets, tomatoes, beans and more.

Brenner, who has an apparently inexhaustible supply of energy -"I go to bed at 11 and get up at 4," he says - seems to be made of the same stuff as his mother. The word undaunted comes to mind.

Brenner had read about Philadelphia Green, a long-established and highly successful citywide gardening program with deep community support. "I said, 'If they can make it work in the inner city of Philadelphia, we can certainly make it work here.'" Similar movements had succeeded in Detroit and Wilmington, Delaware, their antecedents reaching back at least as far as 19th-century English allotment gardens - half-acre plots rented out by landlords to provide a critical food source for marginalized rural laborers.
JAMES AVERY GARDENS
In the U.S., before the advent of Social Security and food stamps, urban community gardens filled a need for food supplements and were widely seen as beneficial to the overall health, education and morale of the population. Civic-minded citizens rallied around the Vacant Lot movement, the School Garden Army, wartime Victory Gardens and Liberty Gardens, as well as the Garden City and City Beautiful movements, all of which sought to leaven the cement and granite bleakness of urban neighborhoods with refreshing green spaces and, if possible, health-giving food.

Brenner's initial spark of enthusiasm, combined with an unusually high friendliness quotient, propelled him into a five-year spate of community garden-making. To date, with the help of hundreds of good-hearted collaborators, he's put in or renovated 10 gardens and is developing a 2-acre urban farm. To make his efforts official, he created an organization called Wilmington Green. Basically it consisted of himself and anyone who was willing to help.

New Hanover Regional Medical Center Gardens

The first garden materialized in 2015, after a friend told him about a group of Burmese refugees with farming skills who were learning English at Devon Park United Methodist Church. They were living in nearby apartments and had no access to gardening plots of their own. The minister, Bill Adams, happily granted Brenner the use of the church's large backyard. Brenner lassoed the New Hanover County Farm Bureau, Downtown Rotary Club, Wilmington Regional Association of Realtors, Sea Coast Advantage Realty and New Hanover County Extension Service into his corral, all of them donating funds. Farmers Supply donated a toolshed, and the Realtors' group helped him install the beds.

Through the Interfaith Refugee Ministry, with some language interpretation, Brenner met with the Burmese neighbors and handed out the seeds, transplants and tools, organizing an overall planting scheme. Before long, the 18 raised beds, each 8-by-20 feet, were teeming with vegetables familiar to the Burmese: Bangkok hot peppers, Japanese eggplants, bitter melons and loofahs - the commonly eaten green stage of the vegetable that, when dried out, turns into a nifty shower accessory. By fall, lush green sorrel plants 5 feet tall and equally wide dominated the once barren churchyard.

In that same year, Brenner heard about a small space behind the Shaw Speaks Community Center at Third and Wooster Street, home to the Elements program, where New Hanover County sheriff's deputies mentored neighborhood youth. "Man, I'm going to go find this," he said. He immediately drove over, knocked on the door and introduced himself. After a tour of the overgrown backyard, choked with trees and weeds, he and the Elements team decided to work together on making a garden. He leveraged this newly formed partnership into a community-wide endeavor, rounding up help from Work on Wilmington - the volunteer corps sponsored by the chamber of commerce and local companies, a squad of teen volunteers from a drug rehab program and what he calls "neighbor mentors." These are individuals in the neighborhood who help with the initial clearing and building stages and, more importantly, agree to help tend the garden once all the hoopla has died down. One neighbor mentor, Queen Bell - the woman who for years has sponsored an annual community day involving free food and clothing for her neighbors on 7th Street - enjoyed working in the Elements garden so much that she went on to get her Master Gardener certificate.

After the Elements garden, Brenner took on the Annie Nixon Community Garden at Dock and 9th Street, a small space that had been planted a decade earlier by a church group and had since fallen on hard times, mostly due to lack of water. Brenner heard about the garden from Delores Williams, his friend, colleague and adviser and one of the most energetic supporters of Wilmington Green. In 2016, with the help of a gift from Live Oak Bank and the Cape Fear Garden Club, Brenner got a tap hooked up to the city water line, cleared and replanted the garden, and drafted a neighbor mentor, a nearby retired schoolteacher, to oversee the upkeep.

In that same year, Brenner met Tom Barnett, then rector of St. John's Episcopal Church, who had the idea of creating a "bridge of love to the community" by planting gardens in the backyard. Brenner, of course, was all for it. The Wilmington Regional Association of Realtors and Sea Coast Advantage Realty once again contributed funds. Under Brenner's supervision, church members and community volunteers installed 12 raised beds, all of which have been officially blessed and are now enjoyed with celebratory neighborhood get-togethers. Half of the harvest goes to the Good Shepherd homeless shelter.

Brenner gives a great deal of credit to the Realtors association for helping to make his community garden vision a reality. They have funded five of his 10 gardens as well as provided the sweat equity and muscle power to clear the lots and build the beds. For the fifth community garden, installed behind the First Christian Church, they worked side by side with Mayor Bill Saffo, who lifted shovelfuls of manure in support of the cause.

In 2017, at a fellowship luncheon, Brenner sat next to an oncologist from New Hanover Regional Medical Center who had always thought the hospital needed a working garden. Within no time Brenner had made a new set of friends among the hospital staff, including the volunteer coordinator, nutritionist, dietitians, the hospital outreach coordinator, doctors and nurses. Together they settled on what Brenner describes as "a beautiful spot with full sun and water already there for irrigation," located behind the four story Heart Center rehab building. The Realtors group, whose name was now Cape Fear Realtors, together with the Cape Fear Garden Club, put up the money for the garden and helped install 12 raised beds, each 4-by-16 feet. Unfortunately, a horde of hungry Canadian geese found the location irresistible and ate the vegetables in seven of the 12 beds down to the nubbins, sparing only the collards.

After the goose catastrophe, Brenner wondered what to do next. Former New Hanover County Extension Director Al Hight suggested using floating row covers. "We planted carrots and spinach and lettuce the first week in December," says Brenner. "We didn't touch it until February. Went out there and lifted the row covers, and to my amazement I had beautiful beds full of lettuce. And the best spinach I've ever raised."

After that, the hospital added a goose-proof fence. The following year, again with the help of Cape Fear Realtors, Brenner and NHRMC embarked on phase two of the gardens, adding 12 more vegetable beds plus a set of eight herb beds, four flower beds and two benches built by a young Eagle Scout named Darryl Chin, whose father worked at the hospital.

For a year Brenner tended the hospital gardens by himself, but eventually one of the hospital administrators whose office overlooked the gardens took pity on him and organized some of the surgeons, nurses and other staff to come out and help. The NHRMC garden is thriving. The hospital staff harvests the vegetables and sets them out in the lobby a couple of times a week for the heart patients to take home. The NHRMC nutritionist conducts cooking classes with produce from the garden. According to Brenner, there's even talk about giving patients "prescriptions" for vegetables.

Once a month Brenner meets at the hospital gardens with a group of volunteers from nCino, a tech company formerly affiliated with Live Oak Bank. "I'll have seeds, soil or plants so we can do the heavy work," he says. "Four people and me, we do the weeding and we get a whole trailer full of weeds."

At the urging once more of Delores Williams, Brenner laid out his seventh community garden at Hillcrest, a Wilmington Housing Authority complex off Dawson Street. Williams was friends with Hattie McIver, WHA's community liaison coordinator. The project brought in area teens from the nonprofit Kids Making It to help create the garden beds, as well as support from Feast Down East, a program promoting local food production. By this time, hundreds of Wilmingtonians had participated one way or another in Brenner's community garden vision.

When funding didn't come through, as happened with his eighth community garden, Brenner footed the bill himself. At Glover Plaza, a WHA residence for the elderly and disabled, he rehabilitated six failing beds and added two more plus a toolshed. Once a month he visits with the residents, works in the gardens and shares in some fresh-picked food sampling.

The ninth community garden - this one at Castle and Fourth Street - was originally started by a man named Gordon Cole with the idea of engaging neighborhood youth in a small food production enterprise that would earn them income and make itself sustainable. Last year, when it became clear that the idea hadn't worked out, Cole asked Brenner if he'd like to take over the garden.

"I said I'd love to," Brenner recalls. Much of the work in the garden up until then had been done by a neighbor mentor named James Avery, a resident of Solomon Towers, the nearby WHA apartment building for the elderly and handicapped. Avery was a skilled and dedicated gardener who, according to those who knew him, had a sixth sense for creating rich, productive soil. When Avery died of a heart attack working in the garden, the space was renamed in his honor. Produce from the James Avery Garden is made available to residents of Solomon Towers and to Mother Hubbard's Cupboard, a local food pantry.

The Cape Fear Humanists, a group already volunteering time at Mother Hubbard's Cupboard, asked Brenner if they could take over the work on the garden. Because they don't have quite enough volunteers to keep up with the weeds, Brenner still goes over periodically to help out. A local architectural firm, LS3P, designed and donated a small prototype hurricane shelter on the property, now used for storage and for meetings of the garden volunteers.

Finally, garden number 10 came about when the Sportsman Club at 11th and Castle Street reached out to Brenner to see about putting in a "Diversity Community Garden" on two lots they owned. The Cape Fear Realtors stepped up to the plate once again to make the garden a reality. It is maintained by club members and neighbors working along with sixth-graders from Williston Middle School, located a few blocks away. The harvest gets divided up among neighbors, middle schoolers and the Good Shepherd Center.

Brenner's biggest dream, one that is currently unfolding in an impressive way, is the creation of an "urban farm." As it happened, Pastor Paul Evans of the First Pentecostal Holiness Church had his own dream of using the church's 2-acre plot to bring together the youth and the church elders and grow food for the community. "Holy mackerel," said Brenner on hearing about this. As of now, the farm boasts two substantial 60-by-80-foot beds capable of growing everything from arugula to zucchini. Plans have been drawn up to add an outdoor pizza oven, a meditation garden, an outdoor kitchen, picnic area, fire pit and greenhouse.

With so much experience under his belt, Brenner now has a formula. If there's room, he puts in an 8-by-12-foot shed for the tools. He sets up a composting area. He buys a combination of half topsoil-half compost when he first installs the beds, and then comes back every two years or so to top them off with a couple more inches of the mixture. Whether it's the planting depth for cucumber seeds (one inch), the average time it will take before a pumpkin can be harvested (115-120 days), the vegetables with the highest and lowest nutritional ratings (kale and onion, respectively), or how many pieces of pressure treated lumber, in varying widths and lengths, will be needed to create the urban garden (170), Brenner has figured it out. For each starter plant he adds Espoma Bio Tone and a tablespoon of nitrogen fertilizer. The plants seem to love it. "They take off like a shot," he says. He reapplies the nitrogen fertilizer with a balanced fertilizer later during the growing season.

None of this seems to be coming to an end anytime soon. Brenner is too concerned with food insecurity, the inequity in access to healthy, nutritious food and the food desert in the middle of the city to slow down his efforts. He's as geared up as ever about providing gardens for people in underserved communities.

"It's important," he says, "to be in touch with the land and where your food comes from and what food tastes like when you grow it yourself." Recently Wilmington Green merged with Community Enrichment Initiatives (CEI) to work together on the urban farm project and on a plan to build a commercial kitchen and garden at the MLK Center. Eventually food from the gardens could be processed in the kitchen and sold or distributed to the community; the group would have a presence at local farmers markets; they could create an income-producing CSA and add a strong educational component to their program.

In the meantime, David Brenner lives wholly outside the world of silos and arbitrary labels. He sees only potential new colleagues, friends and collaborators in the all-important enterprise of growing gorgeous gardens. Field peas, watermelons, lima beans, okra - old, young, rich, poor - they all mingle into a glorious amalgam. And with enough care, the land is brought back to health by all of the people working together. b

Barbara Sullivan is a regular Salt contributor and the author of Garden Perennials for the Coastal South.

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Thanks to the vision of David Brenner, thriving community gardens are popping up all over town By Barbara J. Sullivan * Photographs by Mark Steelman Sometime within the last decade, the pundits began talking about silos, those grain storage facilities which the vast majority of Americans only glimpse while speeding by on [...]

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Spring and summer are great times to focus on gardening. I planted a flower garden with the children each spring when I had a Montessori school. The children always loved to see the flowers blooming when they returned to school at the end of the summer. With my own children, we didn't live where we could have a garden. But you can see what we did in this post: Experiencing Nature and Growing Plants Outdoors without a Garden.

There are LOTS of great Montessori-inspired printables and activities online for a gardening unit. There are too many to begin to cover them all in one post, but I'll share some wonderful ideas here. You could always do a few activities this year and save others for next year.

Montessori-Inspired Plant/Gardening Activities

Free Montessori Botany Materials for a Gardening Unit (my roundup post with lots of free printables)

Shoots and Sprouts Activities + Free Printable from Montessori By Mom (new in 2015)

Montessori-Inspired Life Cycle Activities (includes life cycle of a bean plant)
Free Flower Printables and Montessori-Inspired Flower Math Activities
Exploring the Garden with Babies and Exploring Outdoors - Finding Smells from Rainy Day Mum

Our Garden (Gardening with a Toddler) from A Secure Base

Plant Posts from The Pinay Homeschooloer (Photo from Learning About Flowers)

Outdoor Kitchen and Garden from September

Spring Sensory Bin from Mama of Many Blessings

Botany - The Bean Seed from The Work Plan

Gardening the Montessori Way from Discovery Kidzone Montessori Adventures

Plant Posts from How We Montessori (Photo from Gardening)

Make Like a Montessori Mama: Part 2 - Plant Activities by Kylie from How We Montessori at Modern Parents/Messy Kids

Parts of a Plant (photo), Parts of a Bean, Our Garden, What Is a Biome?, Plant or Animal?, Plants, Plants ~ for Big Kids, and Seed Collecting from Discovery Days and Montessori Moments

Parts of a Plant with Egg Cartons from School Time Snippets

Creating a Montessori Garden Classroom from Montessori on a Budget

Plant Posts from Lesson Plans to Pots and Pans (Photo from Even More ... from Seeds to Plants)

Botany 1 - Montessori Botany Cabinet Work and Botany 2 - Montessori Leaf Cabinet Work from Making Montessori Ours

Gardening Day from Montessori ici

Planting Our Garden from Our Natural Journey

Montessori Trays for Spring and More Garden-Themed Montessori Trays from LaPaz Home Learning

Montessori and Gardening from Montessori Writer

Botany Posts from Homeschool Mo

From the Montessori Garden - A Child's Flower Salad from Momalog

Gardening from Montesori Life (with Downloadable Documents)

Outdoor Botanical Exercises, Planting Day, and The Summer Session concludes at Juneau Montessori School from The Moveable Alphabet

Botany - Week 1, Botany - Week 2 (Photo), Botany - Week 3, Botany Week 4 - Pollination and seed dispersal, Botany Week 5 - Photosynthesis with buttons, and Botany Week 6 - Nitrogen Cycle and Trees from Homeschool Escapade

Dissecting a Flower from What DID We Do All Day?

Flower Activities from Our Country Road

Preparing an Outdoor Garden from We Don't Need No Education
Greensboro Montessori Gardening Program
Kennedy Montessori Garden for Peace (video)

Montessori Gardens Are Growing Young Entrepreneurs from Capital City Weekly

Plant Posts from Montessori Muddle

Botany/Gardening Unit Study Pinterest Board

I have botany/gardening activities of all kinds at my Botany/Gardening Unit Study Pinterest Board. I'll be adding to the board throughout the summer.

Learn more about my eBook Montessori at Home or School: How to. Teach Grace and Courtesy!

The Montessori at Home! eBook and Montessori at Home! eBook and Materials Bundle are AMAZING resources! You can learn more about them here. Buy them in the Living Montessori Now shop.

If this is your first time visiting Living Montessori Now, welcome! If you haven't already, please join us on our Living Montessori Now Facebook page where you'll find a Free Printable of the Day and lots of inspiration and ideas for parenting and teaching! And please follow me on Pinterest (lots of Montessori-, holiday-, and theme-related boards), Instagram, and YouTube. You can find me on bloglovin' and Twitter, too.

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Spring and summer are great times to focus on gardening. I planted a flower garden with the children each spring when I had a Montessori school. The children always loved to see the flowers blooming when they returned to school at the end of the summer.

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However, that is not even remotely true. You see, studies have shown that there are many benefits of introducing gardening to kids at age toddlers to preschoolers. Through garden play, children acquire and improve crucial skills, have fun, and develop self-confidence all the while enjoying a nature-friendly childhood in the Montessori way.

But, how exactly does gardening help a child's development?

What do you learn from gardening?

Free Printable - Animal Homes
Sign up to receive updates on our latest posts and printables, as well as these picture cards that are designed to help your little ones learn about the fascinating world of animals and their habitats.

Well in this article, at MontessoriNature.com we will go over just that.

Skills learned from gardening engage all senses

A garden can be an interactive playground for kids that will engage all of their senses. It's where they can touch and feel the fruits of their labor, fancy the brightly colored flowers, grow accustomed to natural scents, and the sound of rustling shrubs. Of course, you can do indoor gardening with children, too.

To involve all the senses will feed both curiosity and passion in toddlers and thus, the love for gardening and the science behind it, says Gena Lorraine, a fantastic gardening & horticulturist expert. It is at an early age when parents should nourish these activities the most, she added.

But what are the skills children learn from nature and how does gardening help a child's development?

Reliability and responsibility when it comes to taking care of a plant day after day;

Self-confidence: nothing is more rewarding than the fruits of our own labour;

Learning cause and effect - do good, not bad;

Curiosity in species, growing tips, Botanics and more;

Physical activity: gardening makes you move a lot;

Exploring texture: Gaining insight on density, weight, malleability, permeability, and more;

Growing the love of nature: putting love in what they grow;

Teamwork: friends or family;

Math: counting days, measuring nutrition, light exposure and more;

Creativity: crafting own landscape designs or painting a pair of wellies.

When gardening with your kids, try growing plants that possess sensory and textural qualities. Here are a few good examples of sensory plants suitable for kindergarten gardening.

Touch - Houseleek, Jerusalem sage, Lamb's ears and Snapdragons can teach your children the different textures plants have;

Taste - Strawberries, Chives, Rosemary and Cherry tomatoes are just a few of many healthy and tasty treats, simple to grow for children to enjoy (especially when eaten, of course);

Smell - Lavender, Chocolate cosmos, Jasmine and Lemon balm give off heady fragrances;

Sound - Greater quaking-grass, Sweet corn and Bamboo rustle when the wind blows;

Sight - Spider flowers, Sulfur Cosmos, Chameleon plant and Sunflowers are great as they're colourful and visually appealing.

Gardening encourages children to eat healthier.

It's no secret that fruits and vegetables taste better when you grow them yourself. This holds true for children too.

Getting toddlers or preschoolers involved in gardening allows them to experience plant care and nourish a responsible, consistent and positive attitude towards hard work.

For self-grown fruits and veggies children will take great pride, you can rest assured.

Before you can think of it, they will be eating tomatoes, spinach, and even celery! By explaining the importance of gardening from an early age, healthy eating will become a day-to-day habit shaping the foundations of any young mind.

Gardening enhances fine motor development

It goes without saying that gardening and fine motor skills go hand in hand. While in the garden, children are constantly practicing their locomotor skills without thinking about it. In the garden, children have to move around a lot to tackle tasks like watering, fertilizing, pruning, mounting plant stakes, digging, weeding, bending, and gathering, organizing, and storing seeds.

This is how gardening allows children to develop a proactive and healthy routine in life.

Gardening introduces children to science

Using gardening as a way to teach children science is a fairly new and unique approach but considerably rewarding. Not only do young ones become a part of the learning process, but they acquire practical knowledge not found in textbooks.

Here are some examples of sciences that can be taught in the garden :

Botany - through the interaction with plants and dissection of seeds;

Chemistry - through composting;

Math - through the planting and management of seeds;

Meteorology - monitoring the weather and its effects on the garden.

Gardening reduces both the level and effect of stress

Gardening can be a huge stress reliever for children as it teaches how to relax, calm down and control emotions. Spending time in nature, amongst flowers and trees has been proven to make both children and the elderly feel happier.

According to many studies, working out in the garden for just 30 minutes a day reduces the levels of the stress hormone cortisol significantly. Therefore, gardening is a perfect activity to introduce your children to, as it keeps the stress away.

Gardening teaches young one's patience, improves focus, and enhances memory, too

Nowadays, children have an ever-shorter attention span mainly because of the immediate gratification that our digital age provides.

A great way to teach children patience and also improve their focus is through regular garden care.

To achieve that you need to be patient and let children make mistakes to learn from;

Give children their own space and actively encourage them to take responsibility for the plants they sow, this, in turn, will instil in them gratification when their plants progress;

It's recommendable to start with sowing fast growers as that way kids can witness the fruits of their labour over the course of just a few weeks and won't lose interest;

The constant involvement of children in the gardening process improves alertness, memory and even cognitive abilities, thanks to math and repetition.

Gardening teaches children the responsibility of preserving the environment

Helping kids get into the habit of caring for seeds and plants they've sown can instill a great sense of responsibility. Be sure to prepare and follow a checklist of daily, weekly and monthly chores. Аlso, monitor your child's gardening progress and do your best to help them when needed, without interfering too much. This is how gardening develops children, by teaching them that good things take time and effort.

Gardening nourishes self-confidence

Confidence is crucial for the healthy development of any child. It might come as no surprise but gardening helps children feel more capable. Looking after a plant, from sowing until bloom, and seeing their hard work pay off can substantially boost a child's sense of competence.

When it comes to childcare, the benefits of delayed gratitude take long to teach but at the end of the day, are absolutely worth it.

Gardening with toddlers bonds the family

It should be present in every household. To set up you don't need to have a huge backyard, not really. A few pots on the balcony are absolutely sufficient. The time families spend in the garden helps strengthen their bonds to create multiple and meaningful memories. As children learn they set solid grounds fоr great adulthood or something. What they like and what they don't. What is wrong and what is right.

Altogether, gardening in childcare is an interesting, educational, healthy, and social activity that every child deserves. Although growing a garden as a regular activity can take a while, the payoff is more than worth it!

botany resources you might find helpful in your classroom

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The Importance and Benefits of Teaching Gardening to Children Toddlers to Preschoolers

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What are the skills children learn from nature and how does gardening help a child's development? Learn more here.

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From humankind's first farmers to the present-day battle over GMOs, photographer Jim Richardson takes us on a 5,000-year journey documenting how agriculture has transformed our planet and how we must continue to transform in order to feed Earth's ever-increasing population.The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today's leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you.

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Education Resources | National Geographic Society

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Inspire learners to explore National Geographic through interactive lesson plans, maps, storytelling and a wide variety of resources to illuminate their world.