SuperKids Camp’s Garden Art

It looks like my wish for more tours came true. This past Monday, the Perch got a visit from the bookmaking, mural, and pottery classes at SuperKids Camp’s Stadium School site. SuperKids Camp is a Parks & People program designed to give Baltimore kids an affordable summer camp experience, complete with fun activities, reading and math lessons, transportation, and meals. Each site specializes in a different activity, and the Stadium School campers are doing visual arts. One of their instructors, Helen Elliott, called me last week to ask if they could come visit the Blue Jay’s Perch and do some sketches of the fruits and vegetables for their art projects. Naturally, I said yes.

The campers came in three chaperoned groups, divided by which kind of art they were doing, and they arrived with pencils, paper, and wide-eyed wonder. I could barely keep up answering their questions about what was growing where, who took care of what, and what the more alien produce tasted like. Every once in a while, somebody’s curiosity got the better of them; a piercing shriek would echo through the garden as a startled bug landed on an artist-in-training. During one of the groups’ visits, our lovely gardener Amanda came in to harvest tomatoes and water her plot. As an inquisitive flock of children suddenly materialized, she kindly showed them her treasures and explained what each kind of tomato was.

I was pleased to see how excited the campers were. I got the feeling that they saw their visit to this place as a special privilege, and I’m excited that we can be a fun place for people young and old to come to. (It’s an especially great feeling with our stop on the Charm City Farm and Garden Tour coming up in just three days!) My favorite part of the day was seeing how amazed the campers were by the height of the sunflowers. One of the photos shows a couple of boys who decided that the biggest of them looked like a shower head, and then started dancing around underneath it and pretending to wash up. It’s wonderful to see someone awed by the size of a sunflower, and humbling to remember that there’s a whole world of city kids out there who deserve to experience being dwarfed by a sunflower, and to see what can come out of the dirt with a little bit of coaxing. One of the girls, when she had finished her sketches, informed me that we had “LOTS of good food.” Right she is.

If you want to see the final art projects that these sketches are leading to, the show will be at MICA (1300 Mount Royal Avenue) in the basement of the main building, on Thursday, August 2nd, from 1-2:30.

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We’re in the Charm City Farm and Garden Tour!

Hi everyone! Looks like all our gardeners’ hard work has immensely paid off. Our own Ann Beckemeyer submitted The Blue Jay’s Perch for consideration for this year’s Charm City Farm and Garden Tour and we’ve been accepted!!! The tour will be on Saturday, July 28th. We’re so excited to have your support, and we know it will be a wonderful event. There are many amazing gardens on the bill for the day and lots of fun scheduled for the post-party at Cylburn Arboretum. You can get more information and register to attend here.

The Roots and Branches Charter School’s Field Trip

It’s been quite a summer, and we’ve been remiss in our blogging duties. Today I want to tell you about something that happened back in May, a story that got buried under vacation, holidays, the quickly growing vegetables, and other hot weather concerns. No more! Time for you to hear about the field trip that some lovely young friends took to our garden on a drizzly Monday afternoon about two months ago.

At our grand opening back in April, we met Caroline Umana. Caroline is involved with the Roots and Branches Charter School in West Baltimore, a recently approved Baltimore City charter school. She’s also a concerned mom who cares about the education of her own son and that of her neighbors’ and friends’ children. She and the other parents active in the school have been trying to make sure that besides receiving a traditionally high-quality education, their kids would get to learn all about the environment, sustainability, and the importance of where their food comes from. The school has a garden, and Caroline wanted the students in the kindergarten, first and second grade classes to see how a larger garden like the Blue Jay’s Perch is run. We were a bit daunted by the request, since the garden had JUST begun producing, and we had never done a tour for a group before, let alone a group of kids. Would we be able to entertain them? Would they learn anything helpful? We weren’t sure, but in line with our mission  we decided we had to say yes to any opportunity that could benefit our Baltimore neighbors.

When the kids arrived on the proposed afternoon, we had devised a tour of the most interesting parts of the garden, along with the activity of throwing seed bombs into our perennial patch at the end of their visit. The weather didn’t look like it would cooperate, so we were nervous, but the kids jumped out of the cars  looking like they couldn’t care less. At our first “stop” on our tour, the compost pile, we realized what a special and intelligent group of kids we had. They marveled at Audrey turning the smelly compost, and correctly answered questions about the purpose of composting and its components. Leading them through the communal rows was the same, with lots of hands shooting up to ask what vegetables we were seeing, and amazement at the tiny mushrooms that had sprouted up in the damp areas between the rows. Never before or since have I heard a nine-year-old yell, “Oh! I LOVE beets!”

After a visit to the fruit trees came the highlight of the afternoon. Audrey showed our guests how to make seed bombs, helping them pack wildflower seeds into little balls of dirt. With the rain starting to come down, they were getting delightfully muddy, and throwing them onto the perennial bed was a squelching and satisfying experience.

I hope we get to lead more garden tours.

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