What a cool project! Read on …

Solar Education: Students to get dose of math with greenhouse vegetables

by Dale Rodebaugh
Herald Staff Writer

Credit: Jerry McBride/Herald Staff

A photovoltaic system installed at Escalante Middle School will make a campus greenhouse operational and allow students in Sharon Orr’s elective “greenworks” class to do more than grow vegetables.

The project is a collaboration of Durango School District 9-R, La Plata Electric Association, BP and Four Corners Solar. A similar photovoltaic system was installed at Bayfield Middle School last year.

Electricity generated by the Escalante photovoltaic system to power lights and fans in the greenhouse will offset the power the school ordinarily would have to buy. But beyond the immediate benefit, the system will open to students a panorama of educational disciplines, including mathematics, science and geography, Orr said.

It will work this way: A wireless link on the roof of the school will connect the Escalante photovoltaic system to the Fat Spaniel Technologies telemetry network. Fat Spaniel allows renewable-energy producers to display their energy production data and environmental credentials on the Internet.

There, Escalante students can see characteristics of their system and what it’s doing in real time or on a weekly, monthly or yearly basis. Information available in graphic form includes the amount of power being generated, ambient temperature, temperature of the photovoltaic cells and how much carbon dioxide the system is offsetting.

They also can compare their campus system with others connected to the Fat Spaniel network wherever they are. The comparisons they make would put to the test their ability and knowledge of mathematics and geography.

“Our greenhouse has been here for a couple of years,” Orr said. “But the photovoltaic system will get us up and going and allow us to grow vegetables year round.”

In preparation for planting, Orr’s students on Wednesday were weeding an outdoor plot next to the greenhouse for the arrival of topsoil and additives.

Eighth-grader Sheldon Wy-man, 13, wants to pick up pointers to apply to the care of strawberries and watermelons he’s growing at home.

Sheldon isn’t a stranger to agriculture because he’s familiar with the ranch in Craig where his great-grandfather and grandfather raised hay, potatoes and corn.

Reiley Waldo, 12, a seventh-grader, weeds and waters tomatoes and flowers at her house in Rafter J subdivision, southwest of Durango. She was enjoying the garden work Wednesday, which she said was more enjoyable than her physical education class.

Orr, who is scheduled to receive her master gardener certificate at the end of the month, would like to make the “greenworks” elective available to all Escalante students.

The class of 24 students will be doing a lot more than greenhouse work, Orr said. She plans to introduce vermiculture, composting, pollination, plant identification and food preparation before the year is over. In inclement weather, the students can investigate what’s happening on the Fat Spaniel network.

Mark Schwantes, manager of corporate services at LPEA, said the cooperative wants to place photovoltaic systems at the three middle schools in its service area that don’t have them – Miller in Durango and Ignacio and Pagosa Springs.

“Middle school is the best level to engage students,” Schwantes said.

Libraries and elementary schools are potential recipients of similar projects, he said. Photovoltaic systems would fit into educational programs at either schools or libraries as well as serve a utilitarian purpose.

Grants from LPEA and BP paid the cost of design, hardware and installation of the photovoltaic at Escalante by Four Corners Solar. LPEA, which owns and will maintain the system, contributed $12,445 and Orr received $10,000 from BP for the photovoltaic portion of the project. She received $10,000 from the Durango Foundation Educational Excellence for garden fencing and irrigation.

The Escalante photovoltaic system is connected to the LPEA grid, which means that whatever electricity is produced but not used by the greenhouse will be available to other customers. The 3,200 kilowatt hours of power the system should generate annually is about 38 percent of what the average home uses, Schwantes said.

When my husband first pitched the idea of starting a worm bin in our mud room a couple of years ago, I balked. Though generally in favor of any action that can be considered green, I admit bugs give me the heebie jeebies. But Jennifer Craig with Durango Compost Co. made me a believer (see this story on her operation). Last year we bought her worm castings and used them on our garden. At the end of the season, I did a blind taste test between our tomatoes and those grown by another gardener who used Miracle Grow. The tomatoes aided with the worm poop won hands down.

So this year, we purchased one of the bins Jennifer offers. So far, our pound of red wrigglers seem to have settled in fairly happily, though we are still discerning their eating habits and have more refuse then they can accommodate (Jennifer said they multiply quickly so to be patient). My son finds it curious, though so much is new in the mind of a 3 year old, he pretty much took having a bunch of worms in the house as no big deal. The coolest thing: when you put your ear up to the compost in the bin, you can hear them moving. It’s almost like listening the earth breathe.

This touching article below by my colleage Dale Rodebaugh appeared in today’s Good Earth. The part that caught my attention was that 94! other families or individuals competed for the garden. That would add up to a lot of homegrown food if they all were able to find land. One option for those families and others to explore is “land link” on Urban Land Army’s Web site. The site aims to connect land holders with land seekers. I checked and currently there’s several land offers in the Durango area.

Garden Party: Volunteers, contest winners plant for future

by Dale Rodebaugh

When the extended Manore family starts to harvest tomatoes, onions, cilantro and jalapeño peppers in their backyard garden in a few weeks, they can credit the bounty in part to 12-year-old daughter Alexis, an eighth-grader at Escalante Middle School.

A site visit by the sponsors and the level of interest and participation by the applicant also were factors. The project is a cooperative effort by The Garden Project of Southwest Colorado; the Fort Lewis College Environmental Center; Backyard Harvest, a private business; and the Colorado State University Cooperative Extension.

The Manores bested 94 other families or individuals who applied for a free garden. The response to the freebie offer was such that the sponsors have applied for a grant to fund four more gardens in the fall, said Shari Fitzgerald, director of The Garden Project.

Snippets from the essay Alexis wrote reveal her winning touch:
“A garden of our own can help the environment because we would be growing our own edible produce …

“I could believe that I have grown something important to the people everywhere.

“If I were to be able to grow multiple vegetation … it would make me think that I could achieve other goals of mine.”

The Manores couldn’t be more delighted.

“We’ve wanted a garden since we moved here seven years ago,” LaDonna Manore said. “But we didn’t know where to begin, what type of soil we have or what weeds we’d contend with.”

Now, Manore said Saturday, the family will be able to share garden produce with neighbors.

In addition to LaDonna Manore, husband, Robert, and Alexis, there’s son Darrious, 5, and LaDonna’s parents, Frank and Rose Pacheco.

LaDonna Manore works for La Plata Family Center, her husband for the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad.

The sun was starting to bear down Saturday when volunteers from the sponsoring groups began turning over earth in a 15-by-20-foot plot in the Manore backyard. The garden was contained within a frame of discarded railroad ties.

As some volunteers shoveled, others sifted loose earth for shards of whatever or strands of non-native Russian knapweed that had ruled supreme. Darrious took charge of earthworms.

Then, on cardboard that was laid for weed control, crew members placed alternating layers of new soil, manure and aspen chips. The mixture was topped with straw mulch.

“When we work with children we call it our lasagna garden,” Fitzgerald said. “The cardboard is the pasta, the soil the meat and the mulch the cheese topping.”

The last act was the planting of lettuce, broccoli, squash, three types of hot peppers, onions, cilantro and tomatoes.

Fitzgerald has installed 12 gardens since her organization was founded in 1998. The list of free-garden recipients includes schools, the Durango/La Plata Senior Center and the Manna Soup Kitchen. The Garden Project also does educational programs.

The FLC Environmental Center received $4,000 from the Coutts and Clark Western Foundation this spring to fund several environmental projects, including the free garden. The cooperative isn’t turning to the same source for the fall grant, Fitzgerald said. She won’t name the funding source until a decision is made.

The CSU Cooperative Extension will give the Manores a six-week class in home-scale agriculture so they don’t start cold. The family also will receive appropriate hand tools.

On this Earth Day I can’t help but think about my first encounter as a young child with the concept of environmentalism. Of course I didn’t know that’s what it was when I watched the animated film version of Dr. Seuss’ “The Lorax” on TV back in the ’70s. (I recently re-watched it online with my son and was chagrined to observe that it was, in my estimation, overly influenced by the aesthetic of the era and had not aged nearly as well as the original Grinch movie). The tale remains the finest I know for instilling in children the concept that our planet’s resources are precious and finite. The obligation to be a good steward of the environment never weighed so heavily on me as it did after having children. It can be overwhelming and disheartening to contemplate the enormity of the task of trying to not only stop the degradation of our planet, but to improve its condition. But for my children’s sake, I know resignation is not an option. Because, as The Lorax teaches us, “unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

One fun and delicious way to make a difference is to involve your children in growing their own food. I recently wrote about the proliferation of community gardens in the Durango area.  Food activist Michael Pollan, author of “In Defese of Food,” wrote in an article today that, thanks to the World War II victory gardens, “by the time the war ended, home gardeners were producing 40 percent of the United States’ produce.” Imagine what a difference it would make if we could replicate that today. Besides, what is more fun to young children than digging in the dirt?

To learn more about community gardens in the area, contact the The Garden Project of Southwest Colorado. And the La Plata County Extension Office is great resource for backyard gardeners.