"This Orchard Project is my favorite spot because it's like 3 years, or even 5 years in the making. From the original idea to community partnerships, to writing the federal grants, to dealing with federal craziness. It finally pushed through, and it pushed through in a natural aligned time where Michelle Luhan Grisham, our current governor, declared this week outdoor learning week, and the stars align for us to plant our orchard in that week, which I thought was a cool natural alignment. And so, our showcase, planting 40 fruit trees in a middle school in the South Valley is very representative of this long-term movement for farm to school initiatives. So, I'd say that's why it's my favorite thing. The other thing is general food production. I planted about 10 to 15 at Kirtland Elementary, and within a couple years, they were pulling 500 to 1,000 pounds of fruit.  So, you know, double that we're going to be pulling thousands of pounds of fruit off of this eventually. Our students don't have access to much healthy, nutritious food in school systems. The lunch isn't great.  But if we grow the food that they can eat on campus, thinking about how we integrate, it just represents long term systemic transformation, for how our students eat food in educational settings." 

"I was a farmer before I was a teacher. I was working at a 300-year-old family farm called Cornelio Candelario Organics with Don Lorenzo Candelaria, and I had a nonprofit at the time called Grow the Future. We would do farm to school initiatives in partnership with different schools. I think we were seeing probably about 1,000 students every year that would come as a field trip, we were doing different service-learning programs with schools. We were working with seniors. We were just like a hub for farm to school stuff in the South Valley. I had a principal approach me in 2017 and asked, 'can you come in and teach a garden elective?' which I was managing 12 school gardens in the International District in the South Valley as part of some of my funding. So there wasn't a full-time job for this kind of work. Basically, the idea of my job at the time was building capacity at these school gardens so that it's a whole community initiative and supported with some kind of infrastructure and system. It was wild, farming full-time. I'd been working with Van Buren, and that work brought me into different school settings. But this principle at Van Buren at the time, Jerry Heilman, was like, do you want to do a garden elective at our school?  We talked in my nonprofit world, and we thought the best way to really move forward our food justice work here is to plant me within the public education system so that we could bring that element of food justice and school gardens within a formal position.

That year, I was also the refugee family liaison. I worked with refugee families, and they had been watching me, seeing my garden work, and said, 'Do you want to come to Polk and do your garden work down here?' I interviewed with the current principal, Mr. Ben Bustos. He's an old school Chicano from Mora. We had a lot of the same mentors and people we knew in the Osekia movements, and up north, and I just fell in love with his philosophy of trying to be different and unique. Like, a lot of these are South Valley schools, they all were avid schools, they were all bilingual. He wanted gardening and agriculture to be what our unique thing was. And I thought that was a really cool concept. So, he has created a garden resource teacher position for me. That's kind of what brought me here, and the Garden of Dreams has taken off into this dream setup. I think we are probably the biggest agriculture initiative in APS. We started as a school garden, and now they're calling us a school farm, which is a nice evolution for us to be proud that we are, fully functioning farm. I'm trying to figure out how we get a farm number so we could tap into programs like FFA and get some USDA and different kinds of funding sources."

"Everything we do is about soil and water, so the soil health is key. We've worked with different groups to teach us different things. I think there's different styles. I don't think there's one absolute right way to do stuff. I feel like you have to work with what works in your area and what materials you have access to.  Adding compost or organic matter, leaves stay on campus, we bring all the leaves on the field, and they'll be all integrated into the production. We've been working with some soil scientists from Texas State University, we talk about biochar... I think biochar could be a huge application for the Southwest, which is an indigenous philosophy and concept. There's Hugo culture, which is basically just stacking organic matter and growing on it or in it. And so we're kind of reversing Hugo culture. So instead of having a big mound here, we have it under. In the hoop house, we actually excavated 18 inches of dirt and brought in compost and topsoil. They got sticks, and different kinds of organic matter that's stacked under there. One of them has biochar in it. And so we're trying to experiment on what that looks like, just having different sites around the farm that's doing different experimentations. I've talked to some soil scientist people that in our climate, I think a little till is probably pretty good too. There's also the cover crop. We don't have cover crop on now because we're actually in the process of redoing our entire irrigation system out here. I like edible cover crop mentality for example; I could grow winter wheat out here. We could harvest the wheat, and do similar things, or daikon radishes where they're tilling underneath, but then we're pulling them up and making kimchi with them. So, thinking about edible cover crops is kind of where I'm leaning towards. Also, crop rotations. These 4 rows is where we did our corn last growing season. So, the first thing we planted here this year was Sweet Peas. Rotating and bringing in legumes where you do high, nitrogen pulling plants like corn. Now we're doing sweet peas, and next year we could do beans out here.

Also, on the other side of the spectrum, sometimes nature wants to do what it's doing, and it becomes a perennial site. I guess general farming myths maybe out there that you're like, well, don't grow the same thing in the same area. And we kind of go by that. But what if nature wants to do that? If it's just naturally coming up, as a school garden, we don't have to be pressured by yields and productivity and all this stuff. We get to observe nature and see what she wants to do. So, I think there's a lot of plus to that. Of course, while maintaining certain agricultural philosophies and integrity.  I think, you know, to answer your question, it's kind of like take it year by year, take it season by season. See what learning comes up, see how we can transition and integrate."

"Earth stewardship. Just even the concept of taking care of Mother Earth and that we're a part of that, not separate from nature, but we are a part of nature. I think is crucial. Every student that goes through Polk Middle School, the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, can every student get a little farm training, so that every student that's getting promoted from our school could grow something, either at home, or they could be an asset to a community garden. They could jump into a farm internship. So that every single student would have general knowledge of agriculture and growing food. They'd also have general knowledge in composting, hydroponic systems, and then you have students that are going to be doing deep dives that are super interested. So, we have the general population that is coming through here, getting general Earth stewardship skills. Then, you have small groups of students that are really interested, that could be the future farmers, the future ranchers, the future garden resource teachers, that lean in, and hopefully we have internships to support their leadership development."