GreenLeaf

Remember this?!

Thank you all so much for your support and help with our Indigogo Campaign and Dance Your Plants Off! ! !
GreenLeaf raised $9,000 to support urban youth farmers in their endeavor to grow 3,000 lbs of food for their communities next year!

Great News!

1) Our Dance Your Plants Off event has been rescheduled for:

Saturday, April 27

7:30 pm to Midnight

Green Spaces: 1368 26th Street

There will be live music, a silent auction, local beer and tasty treats! The GreenLeaf youth will be DJ-ing the Dance Party portion of the evening, from 9:30 to Midnight. Suggested donation is $15 at the door or online, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

2) Our 2013 online Fundraising campaign is now LIVE at IndieGogo.com!

This year’s campaign features our newest video – a music video that the youth wrote and produced, call “Tomato” (toe-mah-toe). It’s worth a watch (or three million) and will definitely make you laugh.

GreenLeaf counts on the support of our community to keep doing what we do. Our goal is to raise at least $15,000 from donations of all sizes. Please give as generously as you can!

Since returning from winter break, GreenLeaf youth have been in full swing of preparing for what the summer will bring. Decisions including what seeds need to be purchased, what the youth want to grow, how the CSA should operate and how tracking can be done more efficiently are all being discussed. The EdOps team continues teaching an elective course at a local high school, covering topics including food justice (including the food system), health and nutrition, and agricultural practices. The youth structure class-time as if they were taking part in a typical Saturday session at GreenLeaf — game-playing is obviously a must!
The entire youth crew took part in a CPR/First-Aid 2-part certification course, in which they practiced bandaging, splinting, doing CPR, as well as what head injuries and hypothermia could look like. These medical discussions are especially pertinent as we head into summertime — heat exhaustion is common and after this training, the youth expressed feeling more confident in their ability to help themselves and each other. Knowing to stay on top of hydration, wearing appropriate layers and being aware of the warning signs associated with heat stroke/heat exhaustion will aid each youth and adult in preventing both short-term and long-term medical consequences.

Hello dear friends, volunteers, and supporters of GreenLeaf,

We’re so proud to tell you that 2012, as hoped, has been our best year yet! From a fantastic growing season with twelve fabulous youth farmers to a backpacking adventure (the first camping experience for many of our youth), to donating hundreds of pounds of produce to local hunger relief organizations, our youth crew has done amazing work. And we could not have done it without your help and support. Thank you!

In celebration of our wonderful 2012, and looking forward to the adventures 2013 will bring, we have produced a GreenLeaf 2013 Calendar. It’s lovely – 13 full color images (and a few bonus photos) of GreenLeaf throughout the year. It would make a wonderful gift from you to yourself, or anyone in your life!

It’s a bargain at only $12! That’s only $1 per month, with a bonus month for free!!! And, best of all, proceeds support GreenLeaf!

Top 12 reasons to get a GreenLeaf 2013 Calendar:

1. The photos will make you laugh, cry, and happy every time you look at them

2. You may become inspired to grow your own garden. Or just eat more veggies. Or just laugh at our silly cheeto beards (that’s right)
4. It helps babies sleep through the night*

3. Images of food, farming, and summer fun in the cold of winter will keep you going even without the vitamin D from actual sunlight

5. It includes important holidays you won’t want to forget, such as Talk Like A Pirate Day

6. Calendar is spiral bound to lay flat against your attractively decorated wall

7. It makes bearded men absurdly happy*

8. Calendars can be important tools for helping you remember important concepts like time, and important dates like Pi day

9. Buying calendars for all of your friends and family members and writing your own birthday in them increases your chances of receiving more birthday gifts by 207%*

10. Upon receiving calendars, recipients are likely to experience uncontainable joy bursting forth from their hearts*

11. You know you want one

12. It helps support GreenLeaf!

So now that you want to order one or one hundred, here’s how:

o Email Leah@GreenLeafDenver.org to tell her how many you want and arrange payment

o If you email her by Monday, December 17 at 1pm you can get local Denver pickup/delivery by December 21.

o Non-local calendar orders will be shipped if you ask really nicely and pay for postage, but unfortunately we can’t guarantee that they’ll arrive by December 25th (sorry)

* These statements have not been evaluated at all

As some of you know, GreenLeaf opens-up a farm stand every Saturday between April and October for any person to come and claim some delicious, organic vegetables. This farm stand exudes color, as it presents various types of peppers, tomatoes, radishes, squashes, zucchini, tomatillo’s and even pumpkins! Along with the farm stand colors, a customer can expect to be greeted with one or more youth, a smile, and a helping hand. Thus far in GreenLeaf-2-Go, the marketing and distribution team, the youth decided that teaching upcoming crew members what it means to have ‘good customer service’ is essential in creating a positive and helpful aura. It is not enough for customers to approach the farm stand on their own; crew members will be right next to a customer, aiding them in packaging the vegetables, accepting donations, and showing interest in each customers experience at GreenLeaf.

Youth members comprising the GreenLeaf-2-Go team came up with scenarios, simulating what it would be like to have customers approach the food stand and what members of the crew could do in order to make the experience wonderful. They worked together in writing out scripts of both what to do and what not to do as helpful techniques in teaching future members of GreenLeaf. We discussed the importance of customer service and how it can ‘make it or break it’–the youth all showed excitement for creating these scenarios and will be making information posters describing the do’s and don’t's of customer service. As this lovely 2012 year comes to an end, the GreenLeaf-2-Go team brainstormed what improvements can be made regarding marketing, fundraising, and advertising and are excited to hit the ground running in 2013!

Hooray for GreenLeaf’s farm stand!

Now that the harvest season has come to an end GreenLeaf has started preparing for the winter! This includes planting cover crops. Cover crops help prevent weeds from growing and work to put nutrients and nitrogen back into the soil. Cover crops also help to protect the soil from the wind and snow in the winter. After doing careful research AgOps decided to plant a few different types of cover crops this season.

The youth decided to plant a mixture of hairy vetch and winter rye in the raised beds at S-Park. Hairy vetch and winter rye work well together as the hairy vetch puts a lot of nitrogen back in the soil and the rye adds organic material to the soil and also helps the hairy vetch grow!

Hairy Vetch
(http://www.gourmet.com/foodpolitics/2007/06/manure)

Winter Rye
(http://jeffcogardener.blogspot.com/2011_10_01_archive.html)

The youth also decided to plant clover at Mini Eden/Many Eatin as well as in the permaculture bed at S-Park. Clover tends to do well in soil with poor drainage and clover will help to improve the soil quality at both these locations.

Clover!
(http://www.truthseek.net/cloverspic.html)

In the spring we will till the cover crops back into the soil before they seed (and spread) in order to improve the soil by adding more organic matter and nutrients back into the soil.

The youth also decided to plant a few beds of garlic as it was so successful last year!

Garlic!

More Garlic!

This Summer at GreenLeaf was, as usual, filled with fun!

Here are a few photos of the bountiful harvest, and GreenLeaf youth from the Summer of 2012:

This year was very successful for watermelon, cantaloupe, honeydew, and Haogen Melons!

It was also the first year the youth harvested honey from the GreenLeaf bees!

Honey honey honey!

And of course, a game for the youth and Menterns!

Shaving cream and cheeto beard anyone??

This wonderful GreenLeaf Summer filled with games, community work, and a bountiful harvest concluded with the Full Moon Harvest Festival at the Sustainability Park! Our farm stand stayed open late for all of the S-Park visitors who came for the live music, great food, and urban farming community activities that Green Spaces Denver organized. It was a nice celebration of the Harvest Moon and embracing the oncoming autumn.

Speaking of autumn, the early freeze sent our GreenLeaf crew out on a snowy morning last Saturday to gather our fruits and veggies before they could freeze, and now we are moving into the Autumn after school program. The Youth are busy in their team projects, see what each team is up to by visiting our Projects page!

Be sure to come by the Farm Stand next weekend to pick up pumpkins, tomatoes, Fall gourds, and peppers!

The past month has been wonderful at GreenLeaf: we’re three weeks in to our summer program (of awesomeness!) 2012 and both farms are almost fully planted. We’re even starting to harvest a little: the chard, spinach, cilantro, broccoli, peas, and kohlrabi have been delicious!

And GreenLeaf wouldn’t be able to thrive as we are without the help of our amazing, wonderful, and generous community.

-Thanks to you, we raised MORE than our goal of $15,000 by June 2 

-Savory Spice Shop is GreenLeaf’s first local business sponsor: MANY thanks to the wonderful team bringing delicious spicy flavor to the front range!

-ReadyTalk is supporting GreenLeaf, and published this lovely blog post about their enthusiasm for our work.

-A family of GreenLeaf supporters and good friends came to visit us on Tuesday, June 19 and created this blog post and this short film about their experience.

GreenLeaf is featured in a great article by Rebecca Jones in the Colorado Health Foundation’s latest edition of Health Elevations! Read the article – all about GreenLeaf’s work and its impact on one of our youth agri/cultural interns Dwone Cooper.

And check out this video, sponsored by the Colorado Health Foundation and made by Chance Multimedia to see GreenLeaf in action:

…of course, if you like what you see, please consider donating to GreenLeaf on indiegogo!