By Laura Cowan
In a busy age, and now in a time that encourages outdoor activities and social distancing, how do parents help their kids get the most out of outside play time? I recently looked into starting a small cut flower farm on land next to our home. It’s an amazing opportunity to expand my daughter’s knowledge—from watering plants around the house to a full-scale growing operation. This plan may take a few years, if we ever get through the experimental stage, but it got me thinking about how modern parents can get their kids involved in gardening if they don’t have a lot of space in their yard or schedule. Now that Covid is in the picture, we also wanted to check in with local educational and farming programs to find out what is still scheduled for kids.
Turns out, there are tons of programs around Ann Arbor and the outlying areas for immersing your kids in the farm-to-table movement, gardening, or learning about nutrition. When I reached out to local farmers and mamas for more suggestions, I was flooded with response. I heard not just about the Washtenaw Food Hub co-owner Deb Lentz’s farm named Tantre in Chelsea, Growing Hope in Ypsi, and Green Apple Playschool—all of which we visited—but the farm at St. Joe’s, Willow Run Acres, Radiance Organic Farms, Pittsfield Township farm and summer camp, and numerous public school gardens and programs. This rainbow of garden programs are incredible chances to bond with your kid in nature or over whole foods. Even better, these programs are all over town, so there is sure to be one near your neighborhood whether it’s summer, spring, or fall harvest season.
I spoke with a few founders of kids farming programs to get a sense of the variety of activities on offer and hear their stories. Every single one of these people spoke fondly of the importance of gardening as a culture and of the joy of the immersive experience, and I’m happy to share what they’re doing with you before this fall harvest season is over. Ann Arbor and the surrounding greenbelt is an awesome place to get your kids interested in gardening or farming.
Pizza & Multicolor Popcorn at Tantre Farm
Deb Lentz, and her husband Richard Andres, own Tantre Farm, an organic farm in Chelsea, as well as the Washtenaw Food Hub just north of Ann Arbor on Whitmore Lake Road. Not only is Tantre Farm helping feed the community, but they offer programs that teach kids gardening and farming skills.
“We do a number of kid-friendly activities at Tantre Farm,” Lentz said. “During the summer we have had monthly family farm hikes, kids cooking classes, our annual Kid Farm Day in August, a kids garden at the farm, and lots of kid-friendly activities during the CSA seasons—from u-pick opportunities to bubble making to swinging on giant tree swings to collecting eggs from the ducks and chickens.” Lentz said she loves having parents and kids come out to the farm for extended days in the summer, to immerse themselves in the environment of the farm. She believes that farming isn’t only growing food—it’s connecting with the land and becoming a part of a community and a culture.
Tantre Farms hosts educational field trips for school groups and gives edible farm tours for all kinds of children’s organizations throughout the summer, fall, and spring.
“It’s great to let people know there are healthy options out there for activities,” Lentz told us.
Why Tantre? What keeps kids in an outlying area full of farm space coming back to a CSA to hang out when there is so much rural space in Chelsea? Lentz explained:
I’m a teacher of 16 years. My daughter was born, and we started the CSA program. We wanted to connect to the community, and that was still going to involve communication [and education]. I had done some gardening, so the first step was to create a kid’s garden that’s very small and manageable for children. They come on our first spring open house in May on a Sunday and we organize three of those — one in spring, a summer one in July, and a fall one in September . I n May kids can plant something in the kid’s garden. I have seeds set out, and a couple rules such as you have to plant in a row. Kids put their name on a stick and get to label what the plant is [that they planted]. If their family’s CSA pickup is at the farm, they come every week and get to water the plant and let it grow. They might also help weed. One of the greatest pleasures for me is watching those kids get excited as changes happen in the garden.
Lentz said this way, kids see firsthand how amazing it is to watch a plant grow from seed and change through the season until harvest time:
This one little girl would check [her plant] every week and water. She would drag her dad over and have a certain order and routine. She planted popcorn, [so she was] watching that emerge from the soil, watering it, watching what a cob looks like. When a cob appears it’s not ready to be picked until it turns brown, so she watched it through harvesting in September. I always have kids plant a multi-colored popping corn so it’s fun for kids to open the cob…. I give them hints on how to let it dry a little longer .
There was this one little boy who was maybe two when he first started coming to the farm. In the beginning his mom was a grad student at the University of Michigan, now she’s a professor and has a second child. The nanny still brings the boys to the farm and decided to make a tradition of documenting , through photos and videos, the children’s adventures from the kid garden to the swings and bubbles to the slide to the cats and dogs and ducks and chickens. It was something the mom came back the next year and talked about—how the stories helped them through the winter waiting for the next year.
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Lentz is brimming with stories of families who are a part of the extended Tantre Farm family. She said the farm hosts pizza parties where they make pizza from scratch in their brick ovens. Everyone from farm hands to families in the CSA are invited. “There is one family with a single mom who brings her daughter even in winter,” Lentz said. “She used to work on the farm and continues to come on Fridays [for pizza]. Our visitors become part of our lives, and it’s fun to see how this experience has become an important part of their children’s development.”
One mother and daughter came to the farm for years as the little girl grew up. The girl is now 12 years-old, but “for all those years they would come and stay all day. Pack a lunch, nap in the hammock on the farm, walk around and investigate the swamp, tromp through the mushroom forest. They had a sand area where they played and made fairy houses in the woods. They really immersed themselves in the farm. They still come on Fridays,” Lentz told us, “for pizza night.”
So how do parents who struggle to find time to come out to the farm get involved?
“I’m also a board member of the Agrarian Adventure,” Lentz said. “It’s an organization that partners with K-12 schools to enrich students’ connection between the foods they eat, their personal health, and the health of their communities and the environment. Agrarian Adventure runs a program called Farmer in the Classroom and supports school gardens in the Ann Arbor area.” Many of the parents we talked to about farming programs agreed that their school garden was a favorite way their kids connected with gardening.
Programming is a bit up in the air right now, and school field trips are uncertain for the fall with local schools not yet announcing opening plans, but outdoor family hikes are still on the schedule at Tantre Farm, and they have switched their “Plant Walks” to learn about plant varieties to Zoom for now.
Lentz told us another story:
One o f [the] parents [who works with Tantre Farm] works in the garden school program at Burns Park. She actually started as a totally new person to local food and eating things you cook from scratch. She started working with the kid’s garden and loved to dig in the dirt so she would weed and water…. Now she helps with the program. [We do] edible farm walks and come back to do a sit-down arts and crafts nature activity…. She took some of these ideas and started her own after-school activities. It started here [at Tantre Farm] and moved to Burns Park as outreach, and now those activities can move into birthday parties. The education moves to a new place beyond its source.
Most years, Agrarian Adventure hosts a harvest brunch in February so kids can come with their families and learn about the program through a fundraiser. Families come eat a meal made from the food that is locally grown. “Organizations should know there are edible farm tours,” Lentz said. “That has really spring boarded into other things where people say, ‘Can I have a birthday party at your farm?’ We help with the resources we have, and that just happened because somebody asked.”
Some local farms have announced ways of socially distancing U-pick operations or staggering times when people visit for CSA pickups. Make sure you check with each farm before visiting so you know what the current arrangements are.
More than anything, Lentz sees farming as family, so including children in the growing and harvesting is only natural:
It is such an enriching experience for people to make the effort to bring families to farms in the area that are open to that, not just ours. Many farms believe very much in trying to have our community really have a hands-on experience to understand that food is not just about tasting—but smelling, touching, listening to the sounds of nature, and exploring. It’s a very full body experience to be that in touch with the food we put into our bodies.
Lentz said she loves supporting farming programs in schools. “Our whole body is a part of learning how to be a healthier person,” she said. It’s a culture:
It is about encouraging people to immerse themselves in the culture of food. It’s so much more than putting a piece of food in your mouth. You start making healthier decisions not because someone tells you what to do, but because it’s about becoming connected to the land and the face of the land that is a person you had a positive experience with.
And there’s so much delight in the discovery: “You learn that carrots can be yellow or red or purple,” Lentz said. “A bean can start purple and when you cook it, it turns green. It’s like magic! It makes eating food so much more of an immersive experience, and you appreciate and preserve it more with the ultimate hope that we can put more trees and plants in our environment.”
You can learn more about Tantre Farm and connect with programs on their website tantrefarm.com. More information on Agrarian Adventure can be found at agrarianadventure.org.
Growing Hope In Ypsilanti
Cassandra Van Dam is the Youth & Schools Manager for Growing Hope, a program that runs a community farm in the heart of Ypsilanti. Kids can visit Growing Hope and see a working farm in action, right in the middle of the city.
Van Dam explained the basics of the program:
We are a nonprofit in Ypsilanti, started in 2003, and when we started, we focused on working with school gardens. Since then we’ve evolved to address inequity in the food system. We help fund and manage two farmers markets in Ypsi, we have an incubator kitchen to help start businesses, and we have resources for people to start gardens at home. We look at the whole system with a focus on being locally driven.
Growing Hope has several programs for kids. “We have field trips at our urban farm in the center of Ypsilanti where youth groups can come get a tour, explore our hoop houses, learn about farming, and get a nutrition lesson,” Van Dam said. “We also have field trips at our farmers markets.”
If kids are taking a tour of the farm, they see Growing Hope’s efforts toward sustainability, which include permeable pavements, compost, and rainwater collection systems.
“And when we go into the hoop houses,” Van Dam said, “we talk about season extension and how hoop houses work, and the science behind it. Kids can harvest veggies, and we’ll take them over to the picnic tables and either do a nutrition lesson around eating the rainbow in fruits and vegetables or make a smoothie with our smoothie bike.”
You read that right. A smoothie bike. Van Dam said Growing Hope also has an adobe pizza oven. “If they really want to get into it, we can make pizza from scratch, which we do with older kids because it takes a while,” she said.
People’s favorite thing when coming to the urban farm is “seeing a beautiful green space in the middle of the city. The farm is tucked behind our farmhouse,” Van Dam said, “so people walk by every day and don’t see that it’s there. Being able to be on a farm in the middle of the city is a really powerful experience. Being able to touch and see plants grow is fun for the kids.”
Growing Hope has started several other programs as well:
Beyond our field trips we also have after-school programs at certain schools in Ypsilanti. We offer after-school gardening and cooking lessons, and we have a teen program over the summer, where we employ up to 10 teens to work on our farm for 20 hours a week. They learn about farming, selling produce, food justice, and how to teach younger kids about gardening. Applications for those spots open in April.
This summer a new program called Pop Kids also came to the Ypsi farmers’ market. For eight weeks kids could participate in a nutrition activity and get $2 to spend on produce. It’s totally free.
Van Dam says that during coronavirus, some things have changed, but a lot of the programming is flexible:
We will still be running some of our programs. Our after-school teen program will most likely continue, although the majority of it will be outside and teens will have to social distance and wear masks. Our after-school programs at the middle school will most likely be cancelled since school programming is up in the air. We were working with Bright Futures in the spring to provide educational materials in produce boxes to students.
For more information about connecting with Growing Hope programs, including volunteer opportunities for older kids and adults, visit their website at growinghope.net.
Gardening with Green Apple Playschool
Diana Hensley runs the “lower school,” the western location of Green Apple Playschool, which is located in two separate houses on either end of Miller Avenue in Ann Arbor. Both locations focus on teaching children from a play-based curriculum, and both also have a gardening program. The houses are a little small and cramped, but the gardens around the Green Apple Playschools are big, and that’s because kids here are encouraged to get outside and play in the dirt as if they were at home. The location at the base of Miller near downtown has a greenhouse outside and a play yard. The other location next to Miller and M-14 in west Ann Arbor has an entire back yard filled with raised bed gardens.
Hensley told us about the play-based curriculum: “The children are the curriculum,” she said. “We believe in creating a home-like environment.”
Playschool apprentice teacher, Joel Whitehead, said kids take more risks here than some people are comfortable with, similar to Montessori practical living skills. Kids splash through big puddles in the back yard during our visit, and inside they play on a built-in indoor treehouse or nap in cribs. Children are watched by one caregiver to every four children in the lower school (birth to age three), and one for every eight in the upper, which was a busy place during our visit with coats zipping and boot tying for outdoor play time.
During shutdown, the school focused on remote learning, and then reopened with extra cleaning and at a lower capacity. Director Etta Heisler says it has been a challenge, but that the staff stayed busy: “Our teachers completed over 360 hours of professional development and delivered over 140 recorded activities, 80 class sessions, and two day-long special events (Mud Day and Fiesta de la Familia) to our school community,” she said.
Hensley took us for a tour before the shutdown: “Our oldest room is called the sprouts room. It’s very simple. You won’t see a lot of plastics in our school,” Hensley said of the wood furniture and play structure that lined a full wall. “This structure is unique. It’s a treehouse and we allow four kids to go up there at a time and it’s a lot of fun.”
All snacks, vegan, come from Argus Farms, and often contain a seasonal vegetable and a whole grain, and parents bring the child’s lunch from home.
The infant room is dark for napping in cribs, watched over by one of the workers, and two other side rooms are a classroom and a toddler room where kids move from two naps a day to one. That room leads out to the back yard.
Jordan told us that Green Apple also runs a program off-site for older kids that gets them out in nature. The Kids in the Woods program sponsors an after-school program at Thurston Elementary for 10-12 kids from grades K-5. “We take them out to the woods after school, and each week we have different badges—like a compass badge, poison ivy, explorer, tree identification, and finding different leaves. It’s nice to take a break from the little ones and hang out with some eight-year-olds,” he said. It’s a program you can sign up for through the Ann Arbor Public Schools after-school programs.
In the garage is an art studio, where kids can do various projects from painting to chalk. “It’s often open to the outside,” Hensley said, when the weather is nice. While we were there, toddlers splashed through icy puddles, though all bundled up for the activity in water-proof boots and snowsuits. Hensley explained the relaxed home-like mentality of Green Apple:
The philosophy we have here creates a relaxed environment so children are not stressed. We have part-time and full-time schedules. We are a Reggio Emilia-inspired school. That’s an [educational philosophy that came out of a] city in Italy. They have a lot of theories about how children grow.
Back in WWII the town of Villa Cella in the region of Reggio Romana was in devastation. “They had to come up with a plan to revitalize their city and knew children were the future, so they rebuilt the schools,” said Hensley.
“Children are born to have 100 languages,” Hensley quoted from a book by early Reggio Emilia pedagogical leader Loris Malaguzzi, who saw the schools being rebuilt and was so impressed he stayed to help. “Society takes 99 of them and tells them no, you need to do this, and you need to do this to be a perfect human.”
In Reggio Emilia they believe children are beautiful and need to be surrounded by beautiful things and raised in a home-like environment. “That is our curriculum,” Hensley explained. “Our curriculum comes from whatever interests the child has. So, if children want to stomp in puddles we stomp in puddles. We may dig deeper into water play and pull books in on stomping in puddles, we may sing songs. Whatever the interests of the child are, we scaffold that. It isn’t a boxed curriculum.”
Children at Green Apple are given watering cans and miniature rakes to help learn how to plant and grow tomatoes. “Whatever we grow, that comes inside and becomes our snacks,” Hensley said. It’s just a part of the playschool day here, not the full focus, but it does seem to engage the children in a home-like schedule where they help the adults with tasks around the garden and play in the living room like you would find in a family home.
Etta Heisler says Green Apple is dedicated to serving their learning community throughout the ups and downs of schools being closed to keep kids safe: “With the support of county health officials, incredible parent and family volunteers, we are doing our best to weather this storm.”
You can learn more about Green Apple Playschools at greenapplegarden.org.
So Much Growing, So Little Time
Where is a busy parent to begin? Despite the generous support I received from moms and friends putting this article together, it was still a little tricky to identify farming programs in my area online, since so many programs fly under the radar and are word of mouth until you know the program or farm name. One pattern I noticed, however, was that many farms with programs for kids were either connected to the Ann Arbor public school or Rec & Ed system (a2schools.org/reced), and private farms often run family CSAs with more informal kids’ programs or summer camps alongside. If you’re interested in farming programs for kids, from summer camps to CSAs, I recommend… asking a mom. Why do I write this column again? Ann Arbor moms are a Borg collective of wisdom that far exceeds our individual capacity. Or ask a farmer at the farmer’s market or in your neck of the woods. It never hurts to have a farmer for a friend, or a kid immersed in the bounty of what she grew and tended all by herself.
