What kind of nutrition can you buy for a dollar?

Nationally, the average amount of money spent on food (after overhead) to provide children a school lunch is about a dollar. Join the Time for Lunch nutrition campaign. It's about creating better nutritional guidelines and choices for kids.

The National School Lunch Program provides a meal to more than 30 million children every school day. By giving schools the resources to serve real food, 30 million children can have healthier options.

By providing children with locally grown fruits and vegetables, we can support local farmers and create green jobs in our communities. By purchasing local food, we can stop wasting oil needed to transport food and reduce the impact on our environment. By raising children who enjoy real food, we can start laying the foundation for America’s future prosperity.

The Time for Lunch Campaign is a project of Slow Food USA, an educational non-profit with the goal of creating a world in which everyone can enjoy food that is good, clean and fair. Read more about the Time For Lunch campaign here. Get involved, write your national legislator to let him or her know that real food is a priority in to you and your school. To find the office's address, go to http://congress.org and type in your zip code.

Start Up

Let's get growing!
We are getting ready to start fall planting. Each year students and MMES volunteers clean, plant seeds, observe, enjoy, seed harvest, then cover the gardens for the next year. Many of the plants that grow are annuals. That means the seeds don't typically re-seed themselves after one growing season. Sometimes we get surprises that come up the from previous year. This year we are planning on planting vegetable and flower seeds. Come help and enjoy watching the gardens and students grow. (photo from 2008 work day.)

Our 7th year of gardening at the Mine!

Fall Gardening
We will be ready to garden when the weather cools a bit. Mid October is my guess. We will post the work date in the MMES web newsletter when we have it. We hope everyone will help us to get the soil ready for another year of gardening!

A few new things we want to try this year are growing mirco-greens, doing a little worm composting, and perhaps a little reward gardening with the character counts program. Stay tuned. More info to follow in the next few posts. Welcome back gardeners!