Pocantico Hills School celebrates the season with Harvest Festival 2017

Pocantico Hills School celebrates the season with Harvest Festival 2017 Pocantico Hills – This annual tradition has been taking place at the Pocantico Hills School for the last eleven years. Students, parents and staff participate in the week-long event as vegetables are harvested, sorted and cleaned, and then combined to make chunky Harvest Soup. This past Friday our children enjoyed a “seed to table” feast. Third graders and fourth graders collaborated at the Children’s Garden on the Rockefeller Kykuit estate on Tuesday, October 3rd, to pick organic carrots, squash, celery, beans, tomatoes, leafy greens and herbs that were washed, chopped and simmered into soup on site. The Children’s Garden is part of the Pocantico Center on the Rockefeller estate, which is tended to by Senta Stich, and her team of volunteer gardeners, who assist the students and assist the children at different workstations. Susanne Pandich, the manager of public programs at the Pocantico Center said, “It is a pleasure to watch the children learn this way.” As they went around the garden, our children learned the basic structure of each plant (the root, the stem, the leaves, etc.), how they are pollinated, which parts are edible, and the soil cycle (how they decompose). “The program ties to all parts of the curriculum, including and especially science,” said Family and Consumer Science (FACS) teacher Ilana Brennan, who has been directing the program in recent years. Grades one through six play a key role in the festival that continues throughout the fall season. Grades one and two harvest tomatoes and beans from the school based garden. The tomatoes are stewed while students shelled beans for the soup. Fifth graders used fresh herbs to bake bread in the FACS classroom to accompany the soup. The sixth grade picked fresh basil from the school-based garden to cook pesto. “This event is one of the high points of our year,” said Mrs. Brennan, who thanks everyone who helped especially the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Jose Zamora who generously maintain the gardens.