What Fruit or Vegetable Best Represents October?
North Powder made it to month two of their Harvest of the Month Program. Last month North Powder emphasized potatoes, this month it's Pears and Pumpkins. Find out about all of the exciting activities centered around these delicious fall items.
North Powder Pumpkin Harvest
Similar to last month's emphasis on potatoes, this month's Harvest of the Month activities started in North Powder classrooms. Teachers used information from "Oregon Pears" and the Oregon Farm to School Network to teach kids cool things about pears and pumpkins. For example did you know that there are 3,000 varieties of pears?
North Powder parents organized another successful tasting table. This time Lisa Britton of the Baker City Herald also helped out. Britton wrote an excellent article about the students reactions to fresh Bosc pears, and steamed pumpkin. I'll let you guess which one student's preferred.
The pears were purchased from Eagle Creek Orchard in Richland and the pumpkins were donated from a local garden. I like the part where she talks about students interest in the fact that you can actually eat a whole pumpkin. Pumpkin's have an interesting place in our culture. They are very important as decorations on Halloween and as pie on Thanksgiving, yet they are rarely seen whole. Are these uses remnants from a time gone by when we ate lots of pumpkin in a variety of ways? When we had time to roast a pumpkin for an hour? Hopefully North Powder students will have a new appreciation for their jack-o-lanterns.
80 students in the Kindergarten through 3rd grade also got to take a very special field trip as part of Harvest of the Month. After attending the March Farm to School Workshop Val Tachenko of Val's Veggies was excited, motivated, and wanted to play a game to see if they thought the potato would be blue on the inside as well. All of them said no, and boy were they surprised when we cut it open and saw the beautiful bluish-purple designs inside. Lisa Britton of the Baker City Herald attended this event as well with her own daughter. She wrote an excellent article about the experience which was later re-printed in the La Grande Observer (North Powder IS in Union County after all). A lot of credit goes to Val Tachenko for organizing this event. In addition to taking care of the pumpkins all summer she recruited and organized several volunteers who helped the students harvest, wash, and prepare their lunch.
