At first, the seeds looked to eight-year-old Kelsei Douglas like eggs.
She examined them, rolling the granules between her right index finger and the small concave of her left palm, and instead decided they more closely resembled “baby pumpkins.”
During summer vacation, Kelsei and her mom had planted sunflower seeds in front of their apartment building, but those were oblong and pointed, she recalled, nothing like the small, grooved seeds teacher Brian Winslow shared with his third-grade class at the Southwick School in Northfield.
He selected them for their cold-hardiness: The mache, or corn salad, seeds won’t need to expend unnecessary energy, relying on grow lights or heaters, to resist the coming winter months. Encased in each seed is a near-certain lesson in agriculture for Winslow’s students, who in mid-December began learning about humankind’s transition away from hunting and gathering approximately 12,000 years ago.
“The greenhouse lets us travel back in time to the fall. The snow doesn’t land because of the roof, and the walls keep the plants warm,” he said to the clicking of students’ snow boots against metal chair legs. “We’re going to participate in what our ancestors started thousands of years ago.”
As one of 20 educators enrolled in the inaugural class of UNH Extension’s Farms, Forests and the Future professional development program, Winslow drew inspiration from the program’s offerings to encourage his students to think about the natural world around them.
Participants in the agroforestry cohort, all of them K-12 teachers, explored sustainable agriculture through workshops on maple sugaring, food forests, urban gardening and organic dairy farming. At the end of their two-year commitment, educators must demonstrate strides made in student growth as a result of their own learning in the classroom.
Winslow, who splits his week between the Southwick and Sanborton Central schools, has high ambitions for his project. He envisions transforming the Southwick School’s orchard into a food forest, filling in gaps between existing fruit trees with blueberry bushes, shrubs and other ground cover plants. He’s also considering building a nursery in the greenhouse by teaching students to cultivate plants from cuttings or by grafting plants onto rootstocks.
Already, a trout aquarium trickles uninterrupted in the back of his classroom at the Southwick School. Students know to file in wearing puffer coats and winter hats, some asking Winslow at the door if they’ll be going outdoors that day.
“They’re excited to learn from outside,” he said. “Students have a lot of anxiety that comes from uncertainties around the environment. There’s some fear there that students pick up on, and they don’t fully understand it. I don’t really talk about climate change or anything like that, but being able to show them some small problems and solutions just helps them to feel more engaged and less hopeless about this stuff.”
Supported by funding through the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the cooperative program awards stipends to participating educators who are successful in implementing agroforestry in their classrooms. Its goal, according to Agriculture in the Classroom program manager Mike Smith, is to train 60 educators in five years.
Participants’ backgrounds run the gamut. Teachers at the elementary level tend to be generalists — Winslow, an exception in some ways, taught music at the Southwick School for 13 years before taking on unified arts. Most high-school level participants teach science courses, although one is an instructor at a career and technical education center in the White Mountains, according to Smith.
Smith himself spent 23 years as a science teacher at Mascenic Regional High School in New Ipswich, where in 2016, he was recognized for his horticulture work as the New Hampshire “Ag in the Classroom” Teacher of the Year. He knows educators have “enough going on” as it is, and rather than saddle participants with a set of impossible expectations, the program gives them complete discretion and control over how to implement their projects.
The priority is enabling children to engage meaningfully with the Earth.
“We leave it wide open. The way we look at it is, it’s our job to direct them,” he said. “In my classroom, I was never all that worried about curriculum. I’m a big believer in engaged student learning. It’s the most important thing. You can pick whatever topic you want, but kids learn when they’re engaged, period, so we always focused our minds and hands.”
Naomi Mills, a project extra site coordinator at the Pleasant Street School in Laconia, graduated from a similar professional development program funded through the same USDA grant and focused on maple sugaring.
Last year, she brought third-graders enrolled in the school’s afterschool program through the sugaring process, beginning with tree identification in the fall. Students tapped 12 trees in the winter, which yielded 40 gallons of sap, which they transported to the Gilford Elementary School’s sugar shack. Their sap boiled and reduced to a thick syrup, and each child went home with a sample in a small vial.
“They loved it. We tapped the trees, and instantly they were like, ‘Where’s the maple syrup?’” Mills recalled.
Mills said the maple program positioned her to apply for a farm-to-school grant from the USDA. Despite delays to grant funding, in late October, the school received a hydroponic growing tower that Mills has begun using to cultivate lettuce.
She recently filled the tower with test trays where students had planted their lettuce seeds.
“It hits every age level. The little kids helped plant the lettuce seeds and water the tray, another group helped with the final stage, and we can’t wait until we can taste test the lettuce,” she said. “It gives them a sense of ownership, since they’re helping out. It’s a great learning process.”
At the Southwick School, fifteen third-graders charged ahead of classmate Haylie Dubreuil, who “snapped” her ankle playing indoor lacrosse and hobbled toward the school’s greenhouse on crutches.
Haylie sat apart from her classmates as they gathered around a raised bed where a collection of mature mache plants were already sprouting through a blanket of mulch. When their turn to scatter seeds arrived, she couldn’t help but join.
“When I planted my seeds, they went everywhere,” she said afterward.
As much as the planting excited Kelsei Douglas, she looked forward even more to pulling a protective mesh sheet over the plants. It reminded her of setting up a camping tent in her living room with her three-year-old sister and playing inside.
She waved goodbye to the “compost monster,” a waste drum decorated with two silly faces, on her way back to the school building, and she thought again about the sunflower seeds she planted with her mom.
“Over time, I’m going to keep going to the front to check on it and see if it’s growing,” she said.