Seasons in the Lost Sierra

By Marielle Fehrenbacher

When I began my service year in September, I had five summers of experience working in regenerative agriculture and was intimately familiar with small scale agricultural settings. However, my experience was limited to Oregon’s Willamette Valley, always focused on harvesting and processing the summer bounty. I was familiar with tomatoes in the summertime, how to prune and trellis and harvest at perfect ripeness. My memories of farming were of abundance, overflowing bins of zucchinis, rows and rows of bountiful blueberry bushes, caprese salads at staff lunches. Because this harvest had always come from someone else’s care, planning, and hands in the dirt, I found it difficult to envision these spaces in all their seasons. 

Experiencing the seasons from the farm, the garden, the rivers, and trails of Plumas County was one of the biggest joys of my service year.  Now, looking back at the seasons in Quincy, many of the most vivid images are of the Alder Elementary garden, a collaboration with my supervisor, Beth, and 200 students grades 3-6. This project allowed me, for the first time, to envision, design, and manage an agricultural space in consideration of every season. Change is something I’ve grown to notice and love so much more because of the beauty and chaos of this project, and I am so happy to share it with you.  

FALL

Fall at Alder Elementary was a goodbye to the old school garden, a time to get to know the students, and the beginning of brainstorming a new space. Since the original school garden was on a neighbor's property, the district, along with this neighbor, made the decision to return the space and begin to plan for a new one on school property for the sake of safety, sustainability, and student involvement. To close out the final fall at the lower garden, we harvested and tasted the final pumpkins, peppers, basil, tomatoes, tomatillos, and apples. It was through these activities that I began to learn students' names, their favorite tastes, and see how kids exist in a space they cultivated with their own hands. We made and tasted caprese at the last tomato harvest, extracted and roasted pumpkin seeds for Thanksgiving, harvested ingredients and made salsa for Dia de los Muertos,  and pressed apples for cider at Thanksgiving. In our last days in the lower garden, under the yellowing black oaks, we learned together to save seeds. From the old garden to the new, we brought the seeds of peppers, dill, sunflowers, cosmos, nasturtium, echinacea, zucchini, and the beginnings of a vision for a new space.

WINTER

Winter in the garden was a time to rest, brainstorm, and prepare to receive the students in a new space. Starting with just a fenced in patch of grass, our winter meetings, other school garden visits, sketches, art, and Pinterest boards culminated in a very real plan for the new Alder Garden. Our first project was a compost bin made of salvaged pallets and wood. Next, I designed our garden beds, and  Beth and I started construction. We planted our first resident of the garden, a fuji apple tree, as a centerpiece and an investment in shade for all the future sunny days. Winter was also the time for the creation of a library of our saved seeds and plans for sowing them. When the students returned at the beginning of March, we began to seed peppers, tomatoes, basil, corn, leafy greens, and one single watermelon, which we housed in indoor greenhouses. Our long winters and cold nights urge a slow and careful start to the growing season so for now, the dormant apple tree and raspberry bushes were the only ones within the garden fence. 

SPRING 

In Spring, the Alder Garden began to really look like a garden, the apple tree budded and the watermelon we started from seed had sprung up and out of its original pot. We finished and laid out garden beds and worked with the students to fill them with the soil from the old garden. By this time, we had decided we would have a three sisters bed (beans, squash, and corn), a flower bed, an herb bed, two leafy green and root vegetable beds, a watermelon and strawberry bed, and a salsa garden bed. After watering the greenhouses every day for months, we finally began to transfer seedlings into the beds with the help of student hands. At the beginning of May, we finished our first garden art project, a wood panel painted by all 200 students and hung on the fence. By mid-June, we were out of the greenhouses. The students had planted every bed and were on their way to summer break. We established an irrigation system, laid down wood chips, and prepared for our first harvests. 

SUMMER

Summer has been the season of flourishing, harvest, maintenance, and creation. Since school was out, it was up to Beth and me to manage and beautify the garden. At the end of June we made our very first harvest of kale and lettuce, which we donated to the food bank at Plumas Crisis Intervention and Resource Center. Harvests and donations have continued to include copious amounts of basil, dill, snap peas, cilantro, summer squash, radishes, and peppers. In July, we laid a concrete slab and installed a sink for the wash station, planted pots of herbs, created and planted flower beds along the fence, applied compost tea, made nasturtium vinegar, weeded, and discovered the very first watermelon on the vine. Now the garden is chaotic in all the ways we hoped for, flowers blooming in every bed, volunteer sunflowers growing in the compost, peas climbing up squash and corn, and watermelon vines escaping the beds. 

It has been wonderful to be a part of the chaos that emerged from the passing of seasons and the nurturing of students. Seasons become more beautiful, more visceral, when many hands are tasting and planting and creating together.