Garden Club: Sweet potato makin’, Rock-paintin’, & egg-droppin’

This Garden Club’s Question of the Day: What part of the plant is a Sweet Potato? Is it a leaf, a root, a stem? Or something else entirely?

Older students mostly knew that the sweet potato is a root, and one or two (who have Garden Classes with us in school!), knew the Sweet Potato is a tuber.

Sisters Cheyenna and Brazil laugh while peeling sweet potatoes

For the second Garden Club of the year, students made a Sweet Potato mash in the instapot, using fresh sweet potatoes from the garden. Those sweet potatoes were harvested in the fall, so some of the students even remembered the Garden Club when we heaved them from the soil!

Garden Club students Jetzely and Destynee practice using their knife-skills to chop a sweet potato

At the Sweet Potato station, students went through a thorough demo with a Garden Club leader about how to use chef’s knives. While some may want students to only use small paring knives or the plastic ones with serrated edges, we are strong advocates that knife skills are crucial to a well-rounded life. The more comfortable students can get with using them correctly and safely, the better. After the teacher demos how to correctly hold and carry the knife (while only adults carry them from the garden shed to stations, it’s important for students to know), students take turns practicing. Students know that there are no “second chances” at cooking stations- at even the hint of horseplay around knives, Garden Club leaders help the student find another station to be at, though this is rarely a problem. The disparity in skill is interesting: Some students regularly help family members cook and are comfortable using a knife, others have never used a knife, rarely seen an adult use one either, and feel nervous around them.

We help guide each student, stopping or offering a paring knife if they are uncomfortable. After the Knife Skills demo, students take turns chopping, slicing, and dicing ingredients for sauteed sweet potatoes. They follow a loosely, no-measuring recipe, so they are practicing proportions and taste-testing with clean spoons along the way. Garden Club leaders at the stations ask guiding questions: How much salt do you think we should add to start? How big are we making the sweet potato slices? Why do you think the sweet potato is so hard? While students cook, Garden Club leaders also chat about the Sweet Potato- how it is a root, and that is why it’s hard, and how the tuber is essential to helping the plant squirrel away sugars and a reliable food supply for growing later.

Adrienne paints a rock blue and green

At another station, led completely by the teens, students discussed why they had Monday (Martin Luther King Day) off of school. The Teens led a demo, centered around race, with eggs. Race and racial inequality is a challenging topic for any age, but the teens led it with grace and tact. After, the students did some more team bonding with an “Egg race".”

Finally, students painted rocks for the garden; some wrote positive messages on them, others did bright patterns or polka-dots. We discussed art in the garden, and in the world, and why they chose the patterns they did.