Volunteers have spent the summer getting Kemper Elementary School’s garden ready for an inaugural start of the Montezuma School-to-Farm project.
School-to-Farm has been hosting volunteer days in the past few months, which garnered helping hands and donations from businesses to get the project rolling in time for the fall school session.
One of the biggest new additions to the garden – started by teachers in Kemper’s courtyard two years ago – is an outdoor adobe oven that will be used by Kemper’s School-to-Farm project for cooking demonstrations.
“The big plan is, since kids love pizza, is to cook pizzas out here and get them to try different veggies from the garden,” said Montezuma School-to-Farm coordinator Danyel Mezzanatto. “I’d also love to have movie nights out here since we grow our own popcorn.”
The idea for the adobe oven, Mezzanatto said, came from a visiting student from Carbondale’s Waldorf School on the Roaring Fork. Ansel Baker, 14, comes down to Montezuma County every summer, and helped with a previous oven build at Dolores Elementary. As part of his end-of-the-year eighth-grade project, he decided to get an adobe oven built at Kemper.
“I was trying to find something to do, and this seemed like a good idea,” said Baker.
Brett LeCompte, owner of Swallows Nest Natural Building in Dolores, offered his cob-building expertise and some extra supplies to help.
“Ansel was looking for a mentor to help him with the build, and got paired up with Brett, who donated all the clay, sand, straw and multiple days to help mix as well as the tools and expertise. We would have been lost without him,” said Mezzanatto.
LeCompte, an experienced cob builder, said he’s always happy to volunteer with School-to-Farm, and this project was in line with his expertise.
“I helped build the garden shed at the middle school, so I got involved last year. I do a lot of cob building, but never an oven before,” said LeCompte.
Established in 2009, the Montezuma School-to-Farm Project teaches more than 12,000 student educational hours every year, and has school gardens in Mancos, Dolores and Cortez, as well as a children’s garden at Cortez Recreation Center. Kemper Elementary is most recent Cortez school to join the program.
