This past weekend, we had a visit from local high school student James. James is in his last year at Thomas Haney Secondary School, and although his academic interest is in visual arts, he has a big personal interest in growing his own food. We first met James at last year’s GETI FEST, where he and some other students were manning a booth for their school’s social justice club. James and his classmate Annie visited our Farm for Life booth and gifted us with the most awesome of homemade farm-themed buttons, including this one below…

We re-met James at the recent showing of Edible City at our local Cinema Politica event, where Chris K. and I joined the post-film panel for a discussion about food. A couple weeks later, we saw James again when the same film was shown at his school. (One of James’ teachers, Jenny, is really the person who’s been instrumental in connecting us with James. She brought her senior class out to our farm last year for a tour and will be bringing her current class out sometime later this spring. She’s a really rad teacher :).

So, after multiple conversations with James about his interest in growing food, we finally coordinated a visiting time for him last weekend. He came out, had a tour (where we filled his head with words like ‘permaculture’, ‘food forest’, ‘mulching’, and ‘microclimates’), and we put him to work. He helped us fork out big clumps of grass from the former pig run area where we are putting in new garden beds, and he participated with us in experimenting with soil testing.

It was a great visit! We caught some of it on video (posted above) and on camera (below). We haven’t done a lot of video-ing for this blog yet and the camera skills, editing skills, and interviewing skills are something we know we need to improve on (so prepare to start seeing more videos posted as we practice those skills :).

Big thanks to James for coming out (we look forward to more visits!) and special props to Chris K. for modelling his new thrift-store-score overalls!

Chris K. watches our little soil tester do it’s work.

Chris talks to James about soil health.

James works on preparing this area for new garden beds.