Roasted Fall Veggies

digging for potatoes

Fall is a wonderful time to roast vegetables! And the garden is a perfect place to find delicious vegetables to roast and eat. Kids from Lincoln and Northgate Elementary Schools were able to harvest some pumpkins and squash, leeks, carrots, beets, and potatoes and make a tasty snack.  Here is the recipe!

Fall Roasted Vegetables

-  Peel the potatoes, carrots, and beets and cut them into pieces that are about as wide as a finger and about 1 ½ inches long. 

-  Scoop the seeds out of the squash and small pumpkins, and cut them into pieces about ½ by two inches long.  You can take the peel off or leave it on if the skin is thin. 

-  Cut the root and dark green leaves from the leek and cut it the long way.  Use scissors to cut the leek into 1-inch pieces.

-  Toss all of the vegetables with olive oil and place them single layer on a baking tray.  Bake them at 375 degrees for about 30 to 40 minutes.  You should watch them closely and have an adult help you check if they are done by poking a fork in them.  They’re ready to eat when they’re soft and lightly brown.  Delicious!

What else could you roast in the oven?  What about zucchini, broccoli, cauliflower, or yams?  The answer is yes!  Very hard vegetables (like yams) may take longer to cook, so you can chop the pieces smaller, or put them on their own baking sheet so they can stay in the oven a little longer.  This is a wonderful time to experiment in the kitchen and find out which veggies you love the most.  Enjoy!

Celebrating fresh food and fun cooking!

A Greenhouse Stewardship Project--Part 1

A beautiful tomato harvest from the greenhouse

In the IslandWood garden, we have many cycles.  We have our soil-to-snack food cycle, our compost cycle, and even the cycle of our seasons.  But one of our most important cycles, is the Stewardship cycle.

Pulling out the old tomato vines

When an IslandWood SOP Team does a stewardship project, they are actively engaged in the stewardship cycle.  Whether they are planting, weeding, composting or slug hunting, they are helping to care for our garden and ensure that we have a healthy garden-- full of yummy food-- for the next groups of students.

A wheelbarrow full of old tomato vines and proud smiles of a job well done!

Harvesting peppers

We gave Team Lightning, from Madrona Elementary, a big stewardship project.  We've been working to replace our rotting garden boxes inside our greenhouse, and we still had some plants to harvest and soil to move before we could begin work on our new garden boxes.  Team Lightning had tremendous teamwork and their hard work helped us to make huge progress toward our goal.

Plus, they got to harvest some delicious tomatoes, planted by some previous groups of students, while they worked.  They tasted green zebra and stupice tomatoes and sweet peppers--yum!!

Super strong, and happy, students moving out old soil.

Great Teamwork!

Team Lightning had so much fun digging and moving soil that they stayed long past their scheduled time!  Digging in the dirt can be really fun--especially when you are working with friends.  And when they were done, we were much closer to being able to build new garden boxes.  Thank you Team Lightning--great job and a great stewardship project for IslandWood.

Next blog post:  New Garden Boxes!!