Riverway to begin a Green Team and we are looking to YOU for involvement!

I am looking for parents, staff and students who are interested in joining the Riverway Learning Community Green Team that I want to get started. A Green Team can consist of parents, students, and staff with the task is to plan environmental activities and outreach. An option for environmental inspiration and our first meeting would be to visit Growing Power in Milwaukee WI at the end of this April. Their vision is to "inspire communities to build sustainable food systems that are equitable and ecologically sound, creating a just world, one food-secure community at a time." Check out http://www.growingpower.org/ for more information. During this exciting meeting, we can discuss our ideas during the drive, get a tour of their urban farm and volunteer to learn about what they are doing and how we can implement some of their ideas at Riverway.
A few Growing Power Pictures from their site:

Greenhouse showing container gardening with worms.

A beautiful urban garden!

The power of worms! Using worms to convert waste to nutrient rich fertilizer to mix with soil!

Aquaponics in their greenhouse.

Will Allen- Helping to grow the power!

Please contact Rochelle Jansen, MN GreenCorps member serving at Riverway (rochellemjansen@gmail.com or (507) 689-2844)  if you are interested in becoming part of the Green Team. If you would like to visit Growing Power but are not sure if you want to be on the team, you are still welcome!


Thank you, 
Rochelle
rochellemjansen@gmail.com
(507) 689-2844

Secondary Maple Syrup Project

       A group of Secondary students have been working on a Maple Syrup Project. We have tapped trees at the local park as well as a farm a couple of miles away from the school. We started collecting sap in the beginning of March.
       When tapping the trees we had a drill to drill the wholes in the trees. We then inserted the taps into the trees. After that we put the clear plastic tubes onto the end of the taps and the tubes into the buckets. Next year we will be using new taps in order to have a tighter fit in the whole so we won't lose sap that way.
       In order for the trees to produce sap the weather needs to drop below freezing at night and raise to above freezing during the day. This is because when the weather gets warm the water is pulled up through the trees roots to it's leaves and when the temperature drops the tree quickly pushes the sap down to the roots of the tree so that it doesn't freeze in it's branches. When the sap goes up and down like this it comes out of our taps and into our buckets.
        We have collected roughly 100 gallons of sap. This does not mean that we will have 100 gallons of syrup though. It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of syrup. Soon we will be starting the evaporation process. This is where we boil the sap in a special evaporation pan, over a campfire for a few days, adding sap little by little as we go along. Eventually the water boils out leaving behind the sugary substance called Maple Syrup!
        We will be selling our finished Maple Syrup as a fundraiser for our class once it is finished. If you are interested in purchasing some Maple Syrup from our classroom please contact Jamie Harper.

written by: Madison and Haley

Photos to come soon!

Riverway Potato Harvest

By: Dominick Adank

On September 30th, Jaime Harper and a group of Secondary 9-12 students went to harvest potatoes for Fairview Farms. Fairview has been supplying potatoes and many other types of vegetables for our school lunch program. Since they have been so generous to offer us their products, we decided to lend our time and effort to help them with their work. We left our school at around 8:30 and arrived at the farm shortly after 9. We met up with John, one of the farmers, and he gave us some information on potatoes and how their farm runs. After that we started our potato picking extravaganza. They said they were growing 58 rows of 23 different types of potatoes. When we finished, we had completed about 4 rows of potatoes, which was somewhere around 1900 lbs. After we finished, John and the other farmers let us take some potatoes with us. We had such a good time; we told them we would help him out again some time in the near future.