A Poster for a Honky Tonk Dance to Benefit Farm to School program
Hey everyone!
I posted earlier today for the first time in 12 days with a song that I've working on for an upcoming dance to benefit the Farm to School program at the elementary school in my town. I'm going to be sitting in for a few songs with my friend's Honky Tonk band called The Rear Defrosters. I am very much looking forward to this!
Part of the reason for my lapse in posting is that I've been working on this poster for the event.
My partner, Hanna, who runs the Farm to School program at the school, drew the beets. I then cut them out and pasted them down and gave them arms and legs and boots and cowboy hats. I printed out all of the text and then cut and pasted that also. It was interesting to do a collage-like layout to create this and it felt very old-school. The print to the right is one of the color copies so you can't see all the different cuts anymore. I was very pleased with how it came out!
Hanna runs an amazing program. She had kids and teachers from the school planting potatoes at our farm, Tapalou Guilds, this year, which they then harvested and are now eating in their school lunches. She collaborated with a local organic dairy farm to buy ground beef from the culled cows at cost of processing only, meaning students are eating local organic ground beef and potatoes in their lunches!
The Farm to School program just got a nice implementation grant from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, but it wasn't the full amount requested and the money for a greenhouse was eliminated from the budget. So the funds raised at "Honkin' Beets" will certainly go towards a greenhouse. It will be gothic arch style, which is ideal for shedding snow, and probably in the neighborhood of 14' by 50'. It will be made using the Johnny's Gothic High Tunnel Bender, designed in conjunction with Eliot Coleman. This will allow the students to extend the harvesting season to include greater parts of the year when they are actually at the school. The outdoor school garden is great, but the reality is that no one is really at the school from June through August at prime harvesting time. The greenhouse will fill that gap and give the kids more seasonal control over the food they eat.
The dance is at the Broad Brook Grange in the historic Guilford Center Village. The building is amazing, but in need of some major renovations. There is a newly formed non-profit in town, the Broad Brook Community Center, which is negotiating purchase of the building from the Grange in order to take on rehabilitation and new programming as a cultural center of the town. I'm on the board of that group and there are some fantastic people who are going to make this happen. We are just starting the initial fundraising portion of the capital campaign. I'll report more on that project at another time.
I'm going to take all of the earnings from this post and donate it to the Guilford Farm to School program!
So, many thanks in advance for your votes or other donations! I'm really excited to be a part of my physical community here that is building resilience. Likewise, I am very happy to be able to share these happenings and my efforts to contribute with this Steemit community, and to be recognized and rewarded for it. The intersection between these two worlds is a powerful place and Steemit is a huge catalyst at that nexus. It's fascinating to me that this poster that I spent a lot of time on, combined with this story that I am telling you, could actually earn some money for the program, producing tangible goods that improve the health of children in my community.
I'm going to do my best to videotape the entire concert, which I will then post at some point after Feb. 10! It should really be a rollicking good time!
Thanks everyone for your support!
Andy
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Vice Munchies piece on Sugar on Snow event at Broad Brook Grange
Excellent Idea!
Thanks! It's gonna be so much fun.
Looks like maybe I'll be buying a pack of seeds from this post!