[Durham INC] Chef on campaign to plant school gardens (Herald-Sun)

[John Schelp]

Chef on campaign to plant school gardens
By Matthew Milliken, Herald-Sun, 10 April 2010

"In my opinion, every elementary school in Durham should have a garden," Jeff Ensminger says.

He's asking Durhamites to put their money where his mouth is. The 59-year-old chef, businessman and nonprofit organizer has recently had several allies send his fundraising pitch for school gardens to several local e-mail lists. Ensminger is also negotiating with businesses he hopes will sponsor multiple gardens for the Durham district's 29 elementary schools.

Ensminger launched this initiative after consulting with educators and others in Durham. Working through his environmentally oriented nonprofit organization, NEEM, he has assembled a team that will work on a curriculum so the school gardens can serve as teaching tools.

"One of our focuses has been to address the issue of nutrition, obesity, breaking the fast-food chain," Ensminger said. "I'm a chef. Putting people in touch with food -- if you have food in the ground, people will use it," Ensminger said. "If you don't have food in the ground, people will go to the store."

Store-bought food is fine, Ensminger believes -- but it's just not the same as freshly grown food. "It doesn't have the flavor that a tomato does coming out of the ground, just as an example."

His vision is to install four raised beds at each school so children can raise seasonal vegetables. "We want them to understand that a garden is not only a spring-summer event but a fall-winter event, that a garden is a year-round exercise," said Ensminger, executive chef and director of the catering company A Wandering Feast.

He'd even like to see kids sell the vegetables and fruits that they grow. (State law forbids cafeterias from serving food grown on school premises, Ensminger noted.)

Through Thursday morning, Ensminger had raised about $700 toward his goal of $40,000. But he's optimistic about getting full funding.

Thanks to a previous grant from the GlaxoSmithKline Foundation, Ensminger already has money allocated to creating gardens at Eastway and Y.E. Smith elementary schools and at the Holton Career and Resource Center. Holton houses a vocational school, a recreation center and a medical clinic.

Ensminger has identified a handful of local elementary schools -- among them George Watts Montessori, Club Boulevard, E.K. Powe and Hillandale -- that already have thriving gardens.

Ensminger has asked school officials to help sponsor the school gardens project, but he has a levelheaded assessment of the likelihood of getting funds given the current talk of laying off educators.

"Certainly with the focus on teachers and things like that, they're not going to shift money to gardens," Ensminger said.

He is wary of simply making a gift of gardens to the schools. Ensminger intends to require "sweat equity" in the creation and planting of the gardens. He's also trying to find organizations that will sustain gardens at at least some of the schools by working as mentors.

There is some debate about the role school gardens should play. First lady Michelle Obama has embraced school gardens, but in a recent issue of The Atlantic, writer Caitlin Flanagan blasted them as distracting from the business of education.

The responses to Flanagan's articles included KidsGardening.org posting a page of study results indicating, among other things, that school gardens increase science test scores, improve socialization, improve attitudes toward the environment and nature, and increase consumption of fruits and vegetables.

ON THE WEB

To get more information or to donate to Natural, Environmental and Ecological Management (NEEM), the organization spearheading a school garden fundraising drive, visit www.neemtree.org.

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NEEM has lots of veggies in the air
By Matthew Milliken, Herald-Sun, 10 April 2010

Any professional chef must be able to keep a lot of dishes cooking at once. So it should be no surprise that Jeff Ensminger and his nonprofit organization, NEEM, are working on several different projects.

In addition to its public fundraising effort on behalf of local school gardens, NEEM is:

* Holding a plant sale today from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at its headquarters at 2001 Chapel Hill Road.

* Preparing to plant a community-supported agriculture garden at the site. Ensminger hopes to sell as many as 30 subscriptions to the garden, which will produce seven different varieties of tomatoes as well as fennel, soy and more than a dozen other plants.

* Planting gardens throughout North-East Central Durham thanks to a grant from the GlaxoSmithKline Foundation.

* Preparing to open a farmers' market store that will be open Monday through Saturday (although not when the Durham Farmers' Market operates at Central Park on Saturday mornings and Wednesday afternoons). The NEEM Store, as it will be called, will operate at 2001 Chapel Hill Road.

In addition, NEEM is also working to promote use of the neem tree in a Kenya village and to study and propagate Cuban-style organic agriculture.

Ensminger started NEEM 10 years ago, although he only recently applied for formal nonprofit status. The name stands for Natural, Environmental and Ecological Management and is inspired by that of an Asian tree.

To hear Ensminger describe it, the neem tree is the Swiss army knife of plants. It can be used to make spermicide, to drive away insects, to clean teeth, to relieve fever and to treat acne, among many other things.

Ensminger first learned about the tree when he was vacationing in the Grand Canyon in the 1990s and met a South African silk trader. "Any time I run into anything that has that many uses," Ensminger said, "it piques my interest." 

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