Dear Kitchen Gardener,

I hope you're either enjoying or planning bumper harvests.  We harvested a great crop of participation and awareness raising at this year's Kitchen Garden Day celebration and have put together a short video to share some of what happened that day.

While it'd be nice to bask in the warm glow of those harvests, October is too busy a gardening month to kick back.  In Maine, there's pesto and sauerkraut to be made, squash to be cured, apples to be picked, and tomatoes to be canned or frozen.  October also offers some of the crispest, best-tasting salads of the year just ready to be cut, rinsed, and spun.  Garlic traditionally goes in the ground on or around Columbus Day, but that day seems to be slipping back a week or two in our brave new, globally-warmed world. 

October's also a month for adding new life to tired beds through the addition of compost.  For those of you who don't have a heaping pile of chocolate cake-like compost to dig into, autumn's a great time, the best time in fact, to start a new pile using all those vines and stems that have stopped delivering, fallen leaves, and the lush, nitrogen-rich grass clippings that suburban lawns so effortlessly produce in the fall. 

The fall is also the best time for planning and starting new garden projects.  Last week, I paid a visit to the French School of Maine to help them identify a site for a new "potager".  Monsieur le Directeur and a group of professeurs directed me to a rolling, field available for the school's use just a three minute's walk from the school.  I felt a bit envious glancing over the grassy expanse, doing quick math in my head at all the food that such a large plot could generate.  While the field was gorgeous and had very tall weeds (usually a reliable sign of soil fertility), I urged them to scope out a spot closer to the school.  What holds for home gardens holds for school gardens too: the closer to the kitchen, the better. 

We ultimately chose to site the new garden in a high profile and high traffic spot right in front of the school.  Not only is it the best spot in terms of sunlight and promixity, but it sends a strong message that health and good food are high on the school's agenda.  Once they've got their potager dug and their systems in place, they can consider turning the larger piece of land into a true farm capable of supplying their cafeteria. 

This experience and some others I've been a part of recently have got me thinking about where our schools' priorities are now and perhaps ought to be.  A few years back, Maine boasted being the first state to prepare its children for the "information age" by providing every 7th and 8th grade student and teacher with a laptop computer.  Several years into the program, it's amazing to see how comfortable and skilled Maine's young people have become with this important tool. 

This, of course, got me pondering new "firsts" for Maine and other forward-looking states or regions, in the US or abroad.  Which state or region will be the first to prepare its students for the coming "ecology age" by mandating that every primary or intermediate school in its area have an organic kitchen garden and age-appropriate garden curriculum?  Surely, there is no better way to teach health and healthy eating than to engage young people in the process of heathy food production. 

As with the laptop initative, such an idea would surely encounter resistance, but what revolutionary idea hasn't?

Wishing you a delicious October,

PS: It's still not too late to win your chance at over $1000 in prizes through our Grow-Off Show-Off Contest, but the clock is ticking.  As an added bonus, the first 50 entries automatically win a free subscription to Mother Earth News.  Deadline for entries is November 1st.  Note sure what you can enter, then see here.