Slow Down and Think
Welcome to Issue 28. We're keeping it simple again this week, with a look at what's coming up in our classes — and a Thought of the Week that ties together where we've been these last few weeks.
We're heading into week four of the summer semester, which is hard to believe. Let's get into it.
For Students
What to Expect in Class This Week
Regenerative Gardening classes: This week we're talking about local food and health. We'll revisit slow food, food deserts, and food justice — building on the lecture from late last semester — but I'm expanding it this time. We'll also look at green spaces and gardens themselves, and how they improve our health and well-being. So it's really a two-part look at our health: how the food we grow in these spaces nourishes us, and how time spent in the spaces themselves does too.
8 AM Friday Sustainability Garden class: I've got a special demonstration planned. I'm going to try to collect some winecap mushroom mycelium from my parents' yard and start a small mother pile at the Mt. SAC garden. I don't have a lot of the fungus to work with, so it'll be a modest start — but the hope is that as the mycelium grows, we can keep adding wood chips and material and expand it over time. It'll be a fun little demo, and a good look at how these systems get going.
10 AM Friday Wildlife Sanctuary class: I'm hoping to do a trash cleanup activity down at the creek this week, along with some journaling to go with it. This one depends on turnout — our numbers have been low the last couple of weeks, and I'd like to have enough hands to make the cleanup worthwhile. If we're short on people, I have a backup activity ready to go. So if you can make it to this class, please do — I'd love to hold the creek cleanup with a good group.
A Few Reminders
Field trips are done. That's a wrap on all the farmers' market trips for the summer semester. Thank you to everyone who came out — more on that below.
We're in the home stretch. Summer semester is only six weeks, and we're heading into week four. That means we've got this week's lecture, one more lecture next week, and then our final week together will be the potluck. It goes fast.
A note on enrollment. None of our classes have been shut down, and we should be fine through the end of this semester. But the Palomares class and the Wildlife Sanctuary class are both running very low. If we don't get more students into them, they're at real risk of being cut in the fall. I'm going to be handing out flyers and making a real push to keep them alive, and I'll talk more about this in class. If you know anyone who might want to join, now's the time to spread the word.
About the Live Stream
Still no Garden Hangout live stream this week. I've got just two weeks of the HSR program left — this week and next — and I'll be finished with it during our potluck week.
I also want to say a genuine thank you for bearing with me through all of this. Teaching my college courses in the mornings and the high school program in the evenings has worn me down, and I know the newsletter and live streams have taken a back seat. Two more weeks and I'll be through it. When live streams return, I'm planning to run them every other week rather than weekly — a rhythm I can actually sustain. Thanks for your patience while I find that balance.
Thought of the Week
I want to start by thanking everyone who joined me at the farmers' markets these past couple of weeks — and everyone in the online class, too, where we had some really good discussions about what farmers' markets mean to us and to our communities.
There's something that happens when we go to a farmers' market. We slow down. We connect to our community, and through that community, we connect to our own health and well-being. We're not just buying food — in many cases, we're meeting the people who actually grew it, having a conversation with them, closing a gap that the industrial food system usually keeps wide open.
That connection is the thread running through everything we've been doing. When we're plugged into the industrial agriculture system, we tend to be disconnected from our food and from the people who produce it. When we connect to local food systems instead, we connect to a much broader community.
So here's what I'm really hoping you'll take from these past few weeks. My goal — through the markets, the food, the conversations about health and environment — has always been to encourage you to slow down and take an honest look at how you're living. Look at your food: what are you putting into your body? Look at your relationships: who are the people around you? Look at your community: who matters to you, and who are you actually connecting with? Are you connected to the people who grow and prepare your food, or completely removed from them?
These are worth sitting with. My hope is that each of you takes the chance to slow down — and to think.
See you in class.
