For more information about Zompping for Food & Planet, please click here.

**East Durham is a distressed area spanning 120 blocks in Durham. We seek to bring Zompping for Food and Planet to children who attend schools in this area, including Eastway Elementary where 98% of students are on free and reduced lunch, over 90% are African American or Hispanic, and the majority were homeless at one point. The program will be bilingual (English/Spanish).

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Eliza at the Pacific Ocean

Our first farm visit in California was to Slide Ranch. This ranch is a unique working farm in both its approach to education and in its physical setting. The ranch is perched on the coastal cliffs of the Pacific Ocean and shares borders with Muir Woods and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. This location makes the farm part of the National Park system and provides the public with an open space to explore the ocean, forest and farmland ecosystems. While visiting Slide Ranch, we watched a chicken slaughter, milked goats, and prepped their garden for the winter.

That weekend, we drove to Full Belly Farm for the “Hoes Down Harvest Celebration”. The festival hosted hundreds of people and was jam packed with activities. We brought the bus into the heart of the festival and volunteered on Saturday night at one of the many food tents. We enjoyed live music, farming workshops, great food and a night camping under the stars in the Full Belly Farm walnut grove.

After the festival, we drove into Berkley and explored the Bay Area. We all loved the San Francisco/Berkeley area! While in Berkeley, we visited Urban Adamah, a Jewish farm. The UA farm sits on an acre of land and is busting at the seams with healthy produce! Rae, the farm manager, gave us a wonderful tour of their operation which includes raised pallet beds, a huge vermicomposting site, herb spirals, bees, a cobb oven, an outdoor kitchen and two large greenhouses. During our visit to Urban Adamah, we harvested boxes of tomatoes, collards, mustard greens, beans and squash. All of the harvested produce is given away for free to families who are in need. Urban Adamah is also partnered with an organization called Urban Worm. They are a large-scale vermicomposting business that sells worms and worm castings. We were lucky enough to receive a donation of 2,000 worms for our new worm bin.

Urban Adamah

On Saturday, we gave tours in downtown Berkeley’s Farmer’s Market. It was a beautiful day to be giving tours, and we all received surprise visits from old friends. Later in the week, the Sol Food crew worked in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco and helped out building new beds in the Tenderloin People’s Garden. This was the most urban garden we have worked on, because it was literally in the middle of a bustling downtown center! The Tenderloin People’s Garden is a thriving farm that provides free produce for residents of the area.

New vegetable beds at the Tenderloin District

We all had a wonderful time in the Bay Area of California, and were sad to leave. Our final stop in California was in El Segundo. We stayed with Theresa Loe, our good friend and PBS producer from “Growing a Greener World.” Through Theresa’s connections, we were able to visit every school in El Segundo! On our first day, we visited an Engineering and Environmental Science class at the local high school. Later that day, we gave tours to several middle school science classes. On our second day in El Segundo, we visited the Eeementary school and gave tours to the entire school! It was fantastic to talk to such bright and interested students. We received so many smart questions from all of the students we worked with. It was refreshing to be working in schools again, because we all love teaching kids. We had a wonderful time in El Segundo and were highly appreciative of Theresa’s hospitality.

A school group in El Segundo

After months of driving west, we are finally driving back east. In the next week, we will be driving through the southwest, headed for Austin, TX!

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What is it?

Our innovative Zompping for Food and Planet curriculum is designed to be flexible and adaptable for educators, parents, and community organizers. The curriculum brings children on a journey around the world to learn about other cultures and people through food.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, Zompping for Food and Planet follows pre-K to 2nd grade national standards in:

• Cognitive Development: Math & Science
• Language Development & Communication
• Social Studies/Social Emotional Development
• Health & Physical Development
• Approaches to Learning: Creative Expression

Where to find it?

Zompping for Food and Planet was created to be delivered in multiple settings – from mobile classroom units, to moving schoolbus classrooms, to afterschool programs, to libraries, to traditional classrooms. We are currently working on systems to disseminate the curriculum to schools and educational programs. If you are a teacher, homeschool parent, community organizer, or anyone interested in finding a unique way to teach about the world while developing healthy eating knowledge and habits, please contact us.

In 2012, the Sol Food Mobile Farm is taking the curriculum on the road on their 6-month nationwide tour to help communities build gardens, learn about healthy eating, and discovering ways to create a more sustainable world.

The curriculum was first piloted in NC and DC. Please check out these events and testimonials:

• Bull City Food Exchange (NC)
• Inter-Faith Food Shuttle Mobile Market (NC)
• Testimonials and Washington DC Pilot (DC)

Overview

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Traveling Across the West

After leaving Yellowstone National Park, our bus headed to Bozeman, Montana for a much needed restock.  We had an awesome time in Yellowstone, but we were running low on waste vegetable oil, needed groceries, and were in dire need of an oil change. This week has been our first taste of cold weather on this trip, and so we have tried to do everything necessary to keep our vehicle running smoothly.  While we were in town we changed the 8 quarts of oil that is needed to make our bus get down the road.  Ellen led the way getting black and oily as three months worth of travel drained out of the oil pan in a black stream.  It was really exciting to cruise around with beautiful new oil and another 5,000 miles to go.

Ellen changing oil

Before heading out of town we also stopped in (for the second visit) at the Bozeman Food Co-op.  It was by far the coolest co-op we have visited on this trip.  For anyone who finds themselves in the Bozeman area, it is worth a long, thorough visit.  Check it out it!

Bozeman Community Food Co-op

We also met a wonderful family in the co-op who had operated waste vegetable oil vehicles in the past and were thrilled about our bus being in the area.  We were able to get some great tips from them on where to fill up grease nearby.  We took their suggestions to heart and later that day, found ourselves crouched in the parking lots of Taco Bell and Arby’s parking lots sucking up beautiful waste oil for our bus engine.

Bus Hood open

Now we are on the way north to meet Clay Bordley, Eliza’s dad, in Deer Lodge for another week of exploring.  We are so pumped to see Clay and spend some quality time as a group in Glacier National Park.  We are also excited to get another chunk of time to relax and enjoy our bus vacation time before jumping into farm visits in the Seattle area.  Until then, cheers!

The crew

********

Glacier National Park

Hello from Highway 90 in Washington State.  The Sol Food bus is currently in route from Spokane to Seattle; driving through the arid farmland east of the Cascade Mountain Range.  This, week we are celebrating the halfway point of our cross-country journey! Although we still have many weeks to go, we are excited to have made it as far as we have on waste vegetable oil and to have seen so many incredible urban agriculture projects.  As an added bonus we have spent the last two weeks in the Midwest area of the country visiting the Badlands, Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks.  We decided that on our two week journey from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Seattle, Washington we should try and squeeze in an informal “vacation” of sorts.  Our past week was spent in Glacier National Park in northern Montana around Lake McDonald.  Our week their was absolutely amazing, with beautiful mountain views, huge river crossings and lots of time hiking, biking and relaxing.  Check out some of our favorite shots!

Glacier National Park

We even got to meet up with Eliza’s dad, Clay Bordley, who flew into Montana to meet up with the crew for a week.  We were lucky enough to spend some quality time with Clay, hiking, catching up on old times, hiking and of course going through the daily chores of bus life.  Clay even got to drive the Sol Food bus from Glacier National Park to Dunn Creek Campground in northern Idaho.  That night as we filled up water and cooked dinner we realized that the county we were in shared a border with Montana, Idaho and Canada!  It is a surreal moment when we realize how far we have traveled in only 3 short months.

Logan Pass

For those who have never been to that area of the country before, it is worth the trip.  We drove past countless fruit farms, saw tons of wildlife (Mountain Goats, Bald Eagles, and Big Horned Sheep) and enjoyed incredible scenery all week.   Glacier is one of the most spectacular areas of the United States that we have ever experienced.

We are now heading into a week of garden work in the greater Seattle, WA area with a handful of different organizations. Some of our upcoming partners will be with Lettuce Links and Seattle Tilth! We are also filming for the third time with the PBS television series “Growing a Greener World.”  The TV show will be featuring our 2012 Sol Food Tour on an episode of theirs this December.  Our crew feels especially honored to be hosted by such a great show and to have gained some wonderful friends in the process.   The crew will be meeting us again this week to film sections of garden builds, expositions and shots of life on the bus.  Our last film day was in June when we first started our bus tour in Asheville, North Carolina.  After this coming week in Seattle, we will be spending five days in Portland, Oregon and then heading south to Eugene, OR and northern California.  We are looking forward to many more adventures to come so stay tuned!

The crew

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Check out their model for sustainability, as well as their project, Nourish Solar Food Farms, locally-grown year-round gardens using permaculture models.

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Grease

Once we picked up a good amount of veggie oil, we were able to travel willingly without the need for large amounts of diesel fuel.  After leaving Chicago, we chugged northwest to Milwaukee, Illinois.  There, we visited the Growing Power Headquarters, an extensive vegetable farm in the downtown area. Will Allen, the founder and executive director of GP, was brought to our attention when he made a visit to Durham last winter to attend the Local Food Symposium hosted at Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill.  Since attending his lecture at Duke, we have made it a point to visit his innovative operation in Milwaukee. We were not let down!  The Growing Power Headquarters is located in the heart of the city and has an array of enormous greenhouses, wind row composting fields and aquaponic systems. Will has worked tirelessly over the years to come up with unique and efficient systems for urban farming, wind-row composting, hoop house construction and large scale aquaponic systems.  Growing Power now operates urban farms across the United Seas and internationally. For anyone interested in intensive, small-scale farming in an urban setting, the Growing Power Headquarters offers educational tours everyday of the week and online resources.  For anyone interested in intensive growing within greenhouses or in aquaponics, Growing Power is a great place to get your feet wet.  We learned a ton on their tour and can’t wait to spread that knowledge along our route.

Milwaukee

After our weekend in Milwaukee we headed west to the Badlands National Park, the Windcaves National Park, and Mount Rushmore National Monument. We spent four days seeing the canyons of the Badlands, camping, touring the underground systems of the Wind Caves and climbing the bus to Mount Rushmore.  It was an incredibly scenic and eye-opening week of exploring areas of our country that we had never visited and getting a breath of fresh air outside of the city centers where we have spent so much time.  We then spent another five days in Yellowstone National Park seeing geysers, hot springs, rocky peaks and steep valleys that makes that area of Montana so famous.  We are now gearing up to visit Glacier National Park this week before we jump into another month of work along the west coast.

Old Faithful

The Badlands is a rare stretch of rock formations found outside of Wall, South Dakota.  As you approach the park from Highway 90 you watch hundreds of miles of corn fields turn into lush hills of the Buffalo National Grasslands.  Shortly after the scenery change you are met with a sudden formation of orange and red rock jutting out of the surrounding plains in long, spiny cliff faces.  We spent three full days in the park, hiking through the canyons and enjoying some much needed fresh air. 

From the Badlands, we continued west into the Windcaves National Park.  The Windcaves is appropriately name given its elaborate underground cave system which can produce wind gusts up to seventy miles per hour.  We took an amazing cave tour which sent us over sixteen stories underground.  There we got to view unique “box work”, “popcorn” and “frosting” mineral formations only found in the Wind Caves National Park.  We wrapped up our visit to South Dakota with a white-knuckle drive up the steep slopes of Mount Rushmore to see the famous National Monument. 

Our next series of bus workshops and expos will be in Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon. There we will be volunteering with a variety of different community groups- assisting on urban gardens and farms and teaching nutrition lessons from the bus classroom.  Until then, cheers!

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We have FOUR DAYS left to vote Global Potluck as an Awesome Food project so we can continue and expand it. Please help make this the most voted project by clicking here!

Thank you for your support!

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The Bean in Millennium Park

During our time in Chicago, we parked the bus at the ReBuilding Exchange on 2160 N. Ashland Avenue. The Exchange houses reclaimed building materials for aspiring carpenters, artists, gardeners and anyone else interested in reusing found materials for projects.  From there were we able to branch out around the city on bikes to explore the lake front, the Loop and other nearby neighborhoods. On our designated “day off” we ate lunch downtown, visited the Bean and saw some amazing art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Our schedule quickly filled up however and the rest of the week was spent in gardens, schools and markets around Logan Square.

Altgeld Sawyer Corner Farm

Our two most visited garden sites were hosted by an organization called the Chicago Corner Farm.  This active group of community members was spearheaded by Brie and Margaret, two wonderful women living around the Corner Farm sites.  The two plots they manage with the neighborhood are on the corner of Altgeld and Sawyer Street and on the corner of Kimbell and Medill (thus the fitting name “Corner Farm”). We spent two days at each site helping to construct a fence, turn over new garden beds, plant veggie starts from our greenhouse and harvest produce for the local food pantry.  We also had the opportunity of providing Expos to the elementary school next door to the garden.  The Christopher House children were able to join us on the bus for some fall planting, a “Parts of the Plant” activity and tours of the bus.  In total about forty kids came and worked with us on the bus and the local news station even came out to cover the afternoon. 

Ellen working with students from the Christopher House

We also spent time that week at the Logan Square Farmers Market. We were lucky to secure a good spot at a busy Saturday and had a flood of people on bus for tours all morning. We met extremely kind and knowledgeable community members who seemed very engaged in the local garden movement going on in Chicago.  We finished out that great week with a night at The Hideout music venue, where they have “veggie bingo” each week during the summer.  This particular evening was a fundraising night for the Chicago Corner Farm so we were able to say our goodbyes and thanks before leaving the next day.

Our next stop is Milwaukee, WI and then onto some site seeing through South Dakota before weaving our way to Seattle, Washington. Until then, thank you again to all of our family and friends who have supported us thus far and we are looking forward to this upcoming section of our route west!

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Our bus rolled into Detroit to find its first stop at an urban farming organization called Earthworks in southwest Detroit.  The stop consisted of working on one of many Earthworks urban farms and touring their neighborhood network of community gardens.  The Earthworks farm we worked with was linked with the local Food Pantry and was impressive on every level of production. Earthworks trains tons of community members each year through their rigorous nine month farmer training program and their two year long internship.  We spent the day with a wonderful group of community interns and farm students who showed us the ropes of their operation.  We toured their hoop houses, shifted compost, prepared new sections of soil and planted a round of early fall crops.  It was an awesome day spent with wonderful people!

Following our time in southern Detroit, we moved into the center and northern corners of the city.  We met a huge community of local food advocates and policy makers at the monthly “Food Justice Fridays” gathering that we attended early in the week.  The evening of food and speeches was hosted in a local community center near Wayne State University and gathered over sixty people.  The dinner was prepared by local food organizations in the neighborhood and was delicious from start to finish- with fresh hibiscus iced tea, homemade pesto and garden salad and watermelon for dessert!  It was a treat to be a part of such an inspiring community event and we hope to return to Detroit one day for that very reason.

The highlight of our experience in Detroit however was our garden work with the More Food Community Garden in northern Detroit.  Founded and maintained by Gene and Shela, two wonderful neighbors to the plot, the More Food Community Garden is a testament to what dedicated individuals can do with hard work and determination.  Upon our arrival it was clear to us immediately that this garden had a lot to offer- with fruit and veggies hanging heavy on their vines and direct summer sun shining across every beautiful row!  Gene and Shela have arranged with the city of Detroit to have the space dedicated as a community farm and they work tirelessly to keep it so.  We assisted during our time there with repairing their rain water collection system, laying drip tape and building signs and a farm stand table.

With the collaboration of our team, Gene, Shela and Velma, a neighbor to the garden, we were able to accomplish a lot of work in only three days. The garden is now looking as sharp as ever and we are so blessed to have gained three new friends in the Detroit area from that wonderful week.  Now our travels take us further west into Ann Arbor, Michigan for a few days and then into Chicago for a week.  More updates to come!

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Zoar Canyon

Howdy from Highway 90 West as our bus chugs its way to Detroit, Michigan. We have had a wonderful week in Vermont and New York; visiting old friends and learning from some amazing farmers, artists and teacher along the way.  Our last update was from the beautiful state of Vermont where we spent time in the towns of Johnson, Warren and Burlington.  Hands down the highlight of our time there in the Green Mountain state was Reid’s practicum presentation at Willow Crossing Farm!

River Canyon

Over the last year Reid has been completing his certificate in Sustainable Building and Design from Yestermorrow Design/Build School. His experience and expertise has been a huge asset to our national tour and gardening program.  After five months of classes at Yestermorrow last year and nine months of work with the Sol Food bus, Reid was become one of only nine students to graduate with this degree from Yestermorrow.  Before departing for Burlington, VT our bus crew and over thirty visiting farmers, neighbors and professors were able to sit in on Reid’s project presentation.  The evening began with a beautiful dinner, tours of the Sol Food bus and a presentation of the bus design process in the Willow Crossing yurt.  Everyone was blown away by Reid’s work and we made some great friends and connection through the process! Keith Morris, the owner of the farm and the founder of Prospect Rock Permaculture was both a wonderful host and an amazing mentor to us all. Many thanks to Keith and his family for their generosity and donations!

Reid’s presentation at Yestermorrow

At the end of that week we made our way west across the state and into Burlington, VT.  For those who have never visited this amazing city, it is worth the visit!  Upon arrival in downtown you are greeted with the view of beautiful Lake Champlain and the Adirondack Mountain range of northeastern New York.  There is a great lake front park, wonderful restraints serving local foods and a huge array of farms in the Intervale district downtown.  We unfortunately missed the Burlington farmers market by two days but we met some great food advocates and got in a day of exploring in the city.

Our next stop was in Alexandria Bay, New York right on the Canadian line.  There we visited our friend Richard Bell, from Durham, and stayed with his family on an island in the Saint Lawrence River.  Our three days in the Thousand Island District was our first vacation in six weeks of life and work on the road.  We were able to enjoy hot showers, home-cooked meals and real beds for the first time in quite awhile.  It gave us all the energy we needed as we continued south to Buffalo, NY.

In Buffalo, we got the chance to tour The Foundry and visit an amazing urban homestead.  The Foundry is much like the Scrap Exchange in Durham with its intense focus on creativity using recycled and found materials (hence its name).  The Foundry is located in a densely populated area in central Buffalo and is located in a large warehouse.  The warehouse is now being converted into classroom and studio space for local artisans and community members.  Inside you can find lumber and reclaimed materials stacked ceiling high.  There are workshop rooms filled with communal carpentry equipment, a theatre space, rooms for local craft design and a roof top growing hops for home brewing.  Next door is there newly developed community garden using everything from old tires to bike spokes to support their flourishing summer vegetables.  One the adjacent lot is a homestead owned by friend Andrea and Megan that offers community workshops in sustainable home renovations, backyard gardening, cob oven building, composting and other funky projects. 

Niagara Falls

The whole space is truly inspiring and our hats are off to Andrea, Megan, Michael and all the folks with Detroit Re-Use and Net+Positive for their hard work and ingenuity.  Our final stops before this day of travel was to Detroit were to the Zoar Canyon and Niagara Falls in northern New York. two incredible places of natural wonder! Our trip so far has been so filled with adventure and wonderful that we can only expect that and more from our upcoming time in Detroit, Ann Arbor and Chicago. 

Until next time, cheers from the Sol Food bus crew!

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