You're Invited to Open Garden Day
community news
"Whenever I visit, I'm amazed at how they recognize all the different herbs, our native plants, okra, greens, lettuces, and Creole tomatoes."-Chef Emeril Lagasse on the students at the Edible Schoolyard New Orleans
Read the full article in Organic Gardening.
News
"Whenever I visit, I'm amazed at how they recognize all the different herbs, our native plants, okra, greens, lettuces, and Creole tomatoes."-Chef Emeril Lagasse on the students at the Edible Schoolyard New Orleans
Read the full article in Organic Gardening.
New Orleans (May 21, 2010) – Chef April Neujean of Edible Schoolyard NOLA (ESY NOLA) is part of a select group of chefs from around the country invited to the White House earlier this year by Sam Kass, Assistant White House Chef and food initiative coordinator and Janet Mclaughlin, Director of Operation Frontline for Share Our Strength.
Click here to read the full story.
Chef and author Alice Waters helped found the first Edible Schoolyard (ESY) in Berkley, California in 1995. Since then, a handful of edible schoolyard concepts have popped up around the country, including in New Orleans. And now Detroit Edison, a public high school in Detroit, wants in on the action. Producer Mercedes Mejia visited the Edible Schoolyard in New Orleans to see how students learn about growing their own food and the health of their community.
Hear the story on Michigan Radio.
On a recent picture perfect spring evening, a well-heeled crowd mixed and mingled under the stars as they dined on some of New Orleans' finest cuisine.
The Uptown setting for this soiree was Samuel J. Green Charter School, and the night's most special guest was none other than Alice Waters, the culinary visionary and founder of the Edible Schoolyard.
Because of Waters' belief that the best food is obtained locally and prepared simply, in 1996 she created the original Edible Schoolyard at a Berkeley middle school, combining a one-acre garden with kitchen instruction and sharing of student-prepared meals served in the school cafeteria. She is the author of eight books and is the vice president of Slow Food International.
The Edible Schoolyard is having its first fundraiser, "An Edible Evening," chaired by Elizabeth Crawford and Kim Elms; I think this is a great inspiration for your next spring party!
Read the full article, All Fresco Feasts, in St. Charles Avenue
On Saturday, January 30th, Drew Brees and Katie Couric made a special visit to the Samuel J. Green Charter School, days before the Saints’ phenomenal superbowl win.
Read more on our website.
Putting down roots in a space that once held Katrina’s swelling floodwaters, the Edible Schoolyard of New Orleans launched in 2005 as the first affiliate of Alice Water’s garden and kitchen classroom in Berkeley. With the help of over 300 eager students, the program has become a vital part of the city’s community, providing organically-grown food and culinary education.
We contacted with the program’s founding director, Donna Cavato, to hear about her work and why she’s optimistic about America’s eating habits.
Read the full interview with our executive director on the James Beard Foundation website
Students at Arthur Ashe and Green Charter greatly improved on the LEAP tests from 2008 to 2009.
A lot of the 450 kids in the school get 80 percent of their daily calories from the breakfast, lunch and two snacks they get at school. The cafeteria tables have fresh cut flowers and water pitcher so kids can learn sharing and get hydrated. They also make and eat food from the cultures they are studying. For example, Aztec pumpkin soup and quinoa pilaf. There are after school programs for kids who are below grade level in being business entrepreneurs.
Read more about the AFJ's visit to ESY NOLA on Food for Thought
On "All Things New Orleans," food activist Poppy Tooker speaks about New Orleans food culture, Slow Food, and the Edible Schoolyard NOLA.
Weather forecasts call for a 70 percent chance of rain on this dreary mid-September Saturday, but the mood inside Samuel J. Green Charter School couldn't be sunnier. From the cafeteria stage, Kelly Regan welcomes a few dozen visitors — clustered around circular tables set with freshly cut flowers and sweating pitchers of iced water — to the elementary/middle school's first Open Garden Day of fall.
Not so long ago, most school cafeteria choices were limited to mystery meat and starchy sides or fast foods such as pizza and tacos brought in from an outside vendor. But a new age has dawned for young lunchroom diners. More and more schools are integrating gardening into their curricula and using schoolyard-grown produce in lunches to cultivate a taste for healthy dishes.
In 1996, West Coast chef and American culinary pioneer Alice Waters focused her talents on an educational program called The Edible Schoolyard. The concept was simple: by teaching children the value of growing and using fresh local ingredients in the kitchen, they can be re-educated about the benefits of a healthy sustainable lifestyle. Waters had applied this philosophy at her successful California restaurant, Chez Panisse.
Read the full story in The Times-Picayune column "Scene and be seen"
For our first Open Garden day of the 2009-2010 school year we joined with Slow Food USA’s “Take Time for Lunch” event to raise awareness about the importance of improving the Child Nutrition Act to put real nutritious food into our nation’s schools.
Read more in news
A healthy lunch is served at Samuel J. Green Charter school.
If there's one thing that parents and students from all walks of life can agree upon, it is this:
Most school lunches leave a lot to be desired.
Saturday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., you can help do something about that. The Edible Schoolyard New Orleans at Samuel J. Green Charter School will host an event that is one of 290 nationwide, all designed to do one thing: Urge Congress to make the national school lunch program better and healthier.
Adam credits Green Charter School with helping to revive the area since Hurricane Katrina.
"The culture of that school totally changed from what it was before," he says. "You used to be on this porch and hear the kids pass and talking the most ridiculous and horrible language. Now there's a lot of parental involvement in the school, and it makes all the difference."
I spent a recent Friday morning poking through a perfect row of lettuces, dewy from a rain shower. Across the way, a satsuma orange tree was in full fruit; down the path, beets grew alongside peas and carrots. It was a garden reminiscent of Peter Rabbit's, and it was growing in a most improbable place: inner-city New Orleans.
Read more about the sale Good Housekeeping held to benefit the Edible Schoolyard NOLA
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, Tony Recasner’s brand new Samuel J. Green Charter School flooded. Amid the wreckage, Recasner, 48, decided to restructure his school around an innovative model for urban education: the Edible Schoolyard. Created in Berkeley, California, by chef and activist Alice Waters, the program teachers kids about nutrition, agriculture and ecology by having them grow and cook their own food. A former educational psychologist, Recasner believed this kind of experimental learning would make a difference. “It was pretty dark and dim after Katrina, and here we were building a beautiful and bright garden. Creating the Edible Schoolyard provided a really powerful therapeutic intervention for all of us.”
Check out the full article in Ode
It wasn't a textbook that the Samuel L. Green Charter School second graders were eager to dive into on a recent Wednesday morning.
"We're not putting our hands in the dirt yet, OK?" garden science teacher Aaron Ciuffo cautioned his charges, who stood with wide eyes and ready fingers around a black bin filled with organic soil. "We are going to put sand in here to help get some of the water out."
Quick quiz. Would you like to sit in a classroom and study a chart about the life cycle of a plant? Or would you rather dig in the dirt, plant a seed, water it, watch the seedling break through the soil, smell its bright yellow flower, and eventually bite into a juicy slice of fresh watermelon?
For children raised in inner city New Orleans, access to healthy produce is hard to come by, and growing food to eat is an abstract concept at best. But the students at Samuel J. Green Charter School are getting a hands-on lesson in organic gardening through the school’s Edible Schoolyard program.
A concrete schoolyard has been transformed into a garden of learning in hurricane-recovering New Orleans, where students plant and weed, harvest produce and learn to cook it.
Read the full article in USA Today
Growing in New Orleans at the schoolyard garden of the Samuel J. Green School
Colorful flowers and ripe vegetables have long served as inspiration for artistic endeavors.
Monet had his waterlilies; Georgia O'Keeffe had her poppies; and Van Gogh, his sunflowers.
Christina Kim, the designer behind the airy, almost ethereal fashions, housewares and accessories line, Dosa, has chicory lettuce.
The stem of the lettuce, not the leaf, to be precise.
Erinisha Williams and Tyreion Dixon were curious about the man and woman who brought the truck full of watermelons to their school. They asked the man: Where do you live? Is that your daughter? Will the watermelons dies in the winter?
Today, there are only about one-third as many students attending the New Orleans public school system as there were before Hurricane Katrina. The system is recovering from the storm, and from a state takeover to address years of failing test scores. As a result, it has been completely remade, and is now being run by a patchwork of charter school organizers, and state and local administrators.
More than 300 volunteers from Home Depot, City Year, and the community came together at Samuel J. Green Charter School to help build a state of the art playground.
Learn more at KaBOOM!
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