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How Do Our Gardens Grow? With Water! Sign up for Summer Watering Duty
Please add your name to the list of volunteers who'll be working this summer to keep our trees and gardens healthy. We have watering teams scheduled every weekend and need plenty of volunteers to ensure the Murch grounds stay green.
Please email
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if you'd like to join our volunteer pool. You can also come out from 8 to10 a.m. this coming Sunday, June 20, to water and weed. No gardening experience is necessary, and children are welcome.
-- Judith Ingram
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At Murch, preparing our students to step up as global citizens starts on the ground – literally. Students, parents, and staff tend -- and study -- several special gardens including the Butterfly Garden on 36th Street, an herb container garden around the Peace Pole, and vegetable beds that are part of project GROW. We also collaborate with Casey Trees, which has resulted in the planting of more than 100 trees on the school grounds. What’s more, we have several initiatives to promote sustainability, good health, and scientific understanding about environmental issues.
News
Gardening with the Stars – and the First Lady
On June 4, I had the exciting experience of meeting First Lady Michelle Obama and speaking about Murch Elementary on the White House Lawn. Mrs. Obama has been fighting childhood obesity since her husband took office and on this particular morning, she invited 500 chefs, including celebrity chef Rachel Ray and Top Chef star Tom Colicchio, to hear about how they can get involved in schools to teach children about healthy eating. Murch Elementary was selected as a model school for this initiative due to our overflowing garden and successful GROW collaboration with Equinox Restaurant.
With Equinox chef-owner Todd Gray, I told the First Lady and the chefs about the hard work our teachers, parents, and students have done to create an organic garden filled with beets, lettuce, peas, and carrots. I mentioned how our first graders use the garden to learn about “the three sisters” and our fourth graders have decomposition bins in their classrooms filled with wiggly worms; how our fourth and fifth graders gobbled up bowls of salad and our third graders devoured peas dipped in hummus. Delighted by these stories, the chefs were inspired to help out schools in their neighborhoods... >>Read more
Murch’s GROW Garners Post Coverage
Murch got a special mention in a story in the The Washington Post about the role DC chefs are playing in First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let's Move campaign:
Witness the excitement at Murch Elementary, the school that chef Gray adopted in January. His first cooking lesson and lecture were scheduled for a Sunday -- after a major snowstorm. And yet about 250 parents and students arrived at the school auditorium in Northwest Washington. Gray, who will talk at the White House event about his experiences, stood on the stage and showed them how to whip up a cucumber and bread salad and a smoothie with blood orange and beet juices.
"The kids were slugging this stuff back," he recalls. "Parents kept saying they'd never seen kids do that."
Read more in “Chefs fill a tall order: School Lunch” (Washington Post, June 4, 2010). And check out this photo. Recognize the woman in the red dress on stage with Mrs. Obama? She's our very own assistant principal Norah Rabiah!
Twin Gardeners Turned Authors
 Did you know that at Murch we have not one, but two students who have published a book about gardening?
Twins Annie and Veda Hedgepeth, who are in kindergarten, have co-authored a book with their mother, Justine Kenin, called We Grew It, Let’s Eat It! On Saturday, May 22, they had a book signing at Politics and Prose and it was packed. We saw several Murch faces there including Ms. Cresswell, Ms. Magee, Ms. Wierenga, and Ms. Marcus.
The book is told by Annie and Veda, who learn about the White House garden at school. They want to grow fruits and veggies too, but how can they do it if they live in an apartment? Then they meet their neighbor, Ida, who shows them her plot in a community garden. Soon they’re busy sowing and weeding and watering – and eating (not to spoil the ending!)
When asked how it felt to write a book and have it sold at Politics and Prose, Veda said in a soft voice, “OK.” Translation: Delicious!
-- Adelaide Kaiser, 3rd grade
Introducing the Green Scene Recipe File -- Yum!
  
Cooking and gardening go hand in hand. We are collecting great recipes that make the most of home-grown ingredients. If you have a sure-fire garden-fresh dish you like to make, please
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and we'll add it to our Green Scene Recipe File. And if you try one of our recipes, let us know how it turns out! The first recipe we'd like to share with you is for Blackberry Buttermilk Cake from We Grew It, Let's Eat It!
Rock On!
  To mark the transition from studying rocks to studying plants, Ms. Bickart's kindergarten class planted a rock garden this spring.
The class was introduced to three plant families: Cactus; Stonecrop; and Bromeliad. The students learned how plants that grow in dry and rocky environments adapt to the low water supply. Some store water in their leaves, stems or roots. Others have leaves that can hold water like a cup. And other plants absorb water from the air.
Next, the students examined eight of these plants and correctly sorted them into their plant families. Once the plants were planted in their new classroom home, the children added their favorite rocks, left over from their rock study unit, to decorate their new rock garden.
Our plant study is off to a rocky start, but in this case, that's a good thing!
--Sarah Bickart, kindergarten teacher
Fourth Graders Adopt Trees – and Plant One of Their Own
  Mrs. Mathur's fourth graders have been working on a project with neighborhood trees. Each student adopted a tree in his or her neighborhood and observed it for several months: taking pictures and notes, making leaf and bark rubbings, and using their tree as an inspiration for reading and writing. Students also conducted research and examined the usefulness of trees to the urban environment.
In February, the class enjoyed a visit from Earl Eutsler, an arborist with the DC Urban Forestry Administration, who taught the students about trees in the Murch neighborhood. He also presented the class with branches of flowering trees so the class could observe them bloom in their room before the trees outside.
On May 26, Mr. Eutsler visited Mrs. Mathur’s class for a second time. He taught the students about the classification of trees by leaf arrangement, and then took them on a neighborhood walk to identify trees and to study the arrangement of leaves.
The highlight of Mr. Eutsler’s visit was when he helped the students plant a class tree on the hill near the peace pole. Now these fourth graders have a tree to call their own, right on Murch grounds.
-- Asha Mathur, 4th grade teacher
Casey Trees
Murch Joins Mission to Restore District's Tree Canopy
   Murch has been involved with the Casey Trees Community Tree Planting since the nonprofit program's inception in 2005. As part of Casey Trees's mission is to restore the District’s tree canopy, which has decreased rapidly as the city has been developed, more than 100 trees have been planted on or around the Murch grounds. Casey Trees provides the trees and instructional information; our citizen foresters assist in the planting and ongoing watering. The program benefits Murch and the community in a variety of ways: beautifying school grounds, providing shade from native trees, helping to clean the air, and educating children and adults about the important role of trees in urban environments to combat climate change.
To fulfill this mission Casey Trees plants trees, engages thousands of volunteers of all ages in tree planting and care, provides year-round continuing education courses, monitors the city's tree canopy, develops interactive online tree tools and works with elected officials, developers, community groups to protect and care for existing trees and to encourage them to add new ones.
Project GROW
Murch's Veggie Garden: Growing Regionally and Organically in Washington
  
In 2009, the Murch community collaborated with chef Todd Gray and Ellen Gray of Equinox Restaurant to create Project GROW (Growing Regionally and Organically in Washington), part of the Edible Gardens Initiative founded by White House Assistant Chef and Food Initiatives Coordinator Sam Kass, who challenged 15 chefs from the DC area to help improve child nutrition. Each chef adopted a school; Ellen Kassoff Gray and Todd Gray the owners of Equinox Restaurant near the White House, chose our school because Ellen graduated from Murch 40 years ago. Rather than focusing on the school lunch program, the Grays are focusing on gardening and developing a series of garden plots--with lots of help from students and volunteers--on the Murch grounds.
In keeping with the Obama Administration’s focus on healthy eating and nutritional education for America’s school children, GROW aims to give the Murch community a greater perspective on where their food comes from, how to cultivate their own crops, and--most significantly--how to cook and enjoy what they grow. In addition to creating an organic garden on the school grounds, GROW sponsors demonstrations of healthy cooking, composting, and rainwater harvesting. The committee of staff, parents, and community members meets monthly to discuss the evolution and maintenance of the garden as well as the educational connections to the classrooms. Murch teachers and administrators perpetuate the enthusiasm by weaving into the core curriculum lessons on planting, sowing, harvesting, and choosing crops for our Mid Atlantic region.
Read more about GROW's progress:
Mustangs Nibble on First Harvest
May 10, 2010
 Parent volunteers from the GROW committee met with every class over the last two weeks to talk about the gardens and answer the students' questions. All of the volunteers reported that the kids are very excited about the garden and had great questions ranging from color (of vegetables) to compost to consumption – as in, when can we finally eat these vegetables?
On the latter point, members of the Murch community who came to the flea market and plant sale on Saturday had a chance to sample marinated rainbow radishes and a garden salad harvested that very morning. Many people discovered that they DO like radishes when they are fresh and home-grown – or rather, school-grown.
As for what's new in the garden: the radishes are harvested, the purple potatoes have sprouted, and the peas should be blossoming any day now. The blossoms turn to pea pods pretty quickly, so keep an eye on them to watch the transformation.
-- Lisa Burke
GROW Sponsors
The GROW Committee and Murch Elementary School community thank the following individuals and organizations for their generous support of the Murch vegetable gardens.
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