Mount Hebron Greenhouse Winter Event
Soup Tasting and Seed Exchange
Over 40 people elected to spend "Leap Day Evening" at the Mount Hebron Greenhouse First Annual Winter Event: Soup Tasting and Seed Exchange. The Winter event is one of the four seasonal events that are now part of the Mount Hebron Greenhouse program: A Feast For Every Season. Each seasonal event is meant to make the Mount Hebron Greenhouse a destination for the community to celebrate the four important moments of the agricultural yearly cycle.
The Soup Tasting and Seed Exchange is an open house event. The event this year had two scheduled happenings within it. The first was a student demonstration reporting research on various techniques to correctly harvest vegetable seeds as well as a "how to" on successfully potting those seeds to have healthy seedlings for your garden in the Spring. The second was our guest speaker, Dr. Pat Kenschaft, a respected and published gardener, addressing the topics of compost and doubling-digging as a means to remediate Montclair's clay soil. She was accompanied by her husband Dr. Fred Chichester, her invaluable assistant and the current president of the Cornucopia Network of New Jersey.
The evening also included soup tasting. Thanks to our parent committee, Sally Solo, Mary Ann Schaeffer, and Madhuri Mukherjee, we had soups aplenty. Through their own culinary efforts, as well as those of the the soup makers they tapped, the array included; cauliflower and fennel, lentil soup “con pico de gallo sauce", bean and kielbasa, and cauliflower with cheese. The evening included lively discussion around solid information, supported by the calming effect of food: a good time appealing to every taste.
The added strength of A Feast For Every Season is that it is a program not just for the Mount Hebron community but offered as a possible template to any of our district schools with a garden or any school that might be planning to start a garden. It is presented at a time when there is growing sensitivity to the importance of good nutrition developed through sustainable and local agricultural.