FEAST…. Terrific!

By Kelsey Whitaker
Photos by Whitney Hartzell

FEAST is a really good program. It stands for Farming Education and Sustainability for Teens and is a Summer program that gives us school credit for the time we spend participating in a lot of wonderful activities.

Sophie Thixton (in shades), Robin Gropp, and Zach Edwardson harvest broccoli in Rolf Erickson's garden.

Owen Cheevers and Whitney Hartzell [of the Funhouse] make all the arrangements with the contributors who work with us, and they just deal with and think of everything to make sure we have fun while we’re learning a lot! We’re so lucky to have them do this for us.

Thanks also to [Orcas Island teacher] Kari Schuh for once again this year being such a great help! The kids are really glad she has been willing to spend so much time with us, and with Whitney and Owen to make so many things possible. Megan Corbett organized the booth at the Saturday Farmer’s Market, and we’ve had a lot of fun telling visitors about our program. Thanks Megan!

We went to really cool farms and amazing places this year and are still not done yet! At the Bullock’s we learned about their homestead and some permaculture principles such as creating resiliency, diversity, and stacking functions. Another farm we went to was Coffelt’s, where thanks to Ruthie Dougherty we learned about packing wool and stacking straw bales. Ruthie also arranged a day for us to help clean up metal on the beach and to clear a trail in Judd’s Cove in the new conservation area.

We spent time at La Campesina with Rhonda Barbieri and learned about how awesome it is to work with bees and find out how they make their honey. Rolf Erickson let us pick a lot of berries the day we visited with him, and taught us about humanure and how important it is to recapture our waste. It sure makes a healthy garden, his broccoli were huge!

At Tim Forbes’ Live Edge Building down by the ferry, we met his family and saw their amazing house which was designed mostly with sacred geometry in mind and their son Sky Bear is also designing and helping build his own house (he’s only 15!)

Michael Budnick showed us his home garden, and how to prune trees, then took us on a (long) walk in the woods to learn about trees, and told us which plants are edible and non-edible. Julian Glasser, who just graduated from our high school this year, taught us how to repair our bikes so we could take them on a ride to Lopez.

Jorgen Harle teaches Paelle Powell how to forge as part of the FEAST program

On Lopez we checked out their amazing school garden, and greenhouses, as well as visited the S&S Bio-Dynamic Homestead. We did blacksmithing with Jorgen Harle at his forge where we made implements out of iron. We weeded around onions and strawberries at Morning Star Farm, and went swimming in their wonderful pond with the trampoline. I’ve been working with them on Friday mornings for my internship, which has been great. They even let me cook lunch for the interns from the produce we harvest that day! Ryan Drum from Waldron taught us a lot about edible plants and the wonders of SO MUCH nature, that we would have never known.

To the kids that are doing FEAST, I hope you appreciate what all of these great people on this Island do and also that there is a FEAST program to have people teach you how to live a sustainable life now and in the future. Thanks again to everyone who contributed to FEAST. We hope to see you next year and that FEAST will turn out to be a year round program. FEAST ROCKS!!!