Grassroots gardening, recycling blooms in Akiak

Published on March 11th, 2010

By SHELLY SINCLAIR

(Editor's note: The following is a report from Shelly Sinclair, who teaches seventh-12th-grade science and math in Akiak, about efforts to clean up and green up the village of 340. High school and middle schools students are playing a key role. With help from grants and teachers, they're encouraging residents to take up gardening. They're analyzing water samples to help protect the Kuskokwim River. And they plan to build a greenhouse to promote healthy eating.)

Most Alaskan families have a dog pot where they put scraps for their dogs.

In Akiak, we've got dog pots, bunny pots, and worm pots!

All our meat, bone and skin scraps go to the dogs, of course.

In addition, our vegetable trimmings go to the rabbits. The rabbits then turn the vegetable trimmings into excellent fertilizer that is put into each pot of vegetables or herbs growing in our plant stands.

Coffee grounds, fruit scraps, potato peelings, and even tea bags go into our worm bin along with some more of that bunny poop to be turned into loamy, fertile soil for our plants in the plant stands.

The vegetables and herbs are being grown indoors in five different plant light stands as a source of fresh vegetables for people and the bunnies and also as transplants that will go into home gardens around Akiak this spring.

In addition to providing excellent fertilizer for the plants, our two female rabbits and one male rabbit are providing us with lots of baby bunnies that will be used for fresh meat and skins for hand-sewn mittens.

We are also talking about getting all the contents of the Akiak dump hauled away by a barge this spring in order to protect our ground water system from further pollution.

Also, we hope to see the leaking oil tanks removed next spring.

Everyone is recycling his or her pop cans. Large plastic coffee cans and one-gallon food cans are being recycled to grow plants in them.

Joe Digrande, student counselor, is getting another grant to buy two large rotating compost bins. We're hoping to get a grant to buy a paper shredder so that we can shred old newspapers and feed them to the worms.

We're hoping to buy a chipper-shredder so that we can turn small branches into wood chips that will go underneath the cages of the rabbits and then after we clean under the rabbits, into the compost bins to be turned into rich soil.

We want to find a way to recycle all cardboard boxes and other paper products to use as fuel for heating homes. We would like to have a sewage treatment plant built in Akiak so that all wastewater is completely clean before putting it back into our river and our ground water system.

Our high school students did 11 different chemical tests on water from several sites on the Kuskokwim River and found that untreated gray water is causing our river water to be high in phosphates and to have a pH of 8 to 9. So, we want to clean up our river.

Lena leads recycling

Lena Foss, local recycling coordinator for AmeriCorps, is working hard to get the dump cleaned up and to get people to recycle in the village. Lena (Mumchuk) is definitely the Queen of Recycling here in Akiak. She'll hire students to care for the greenhouse plants and the animals.

She's encouraging the villagers to dig up a garden plot by their house this spring so that we can put in cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, and kale plants for them a long with seeds for carrots, parsnips, beets, turnips, radishes, Swiss chard, rutabagas, potatoes, and onions.

For those families who want to start their family garden before the ground thaws, we can set them up with soil from berms in front of the school and discarded skiffs that can serve as a raised garden.

Lena is also looking for young people whom she can train to care for plants in the greenhouse that will soon be built, and in the plant stands, breed and care for the rabbit colony, help families get their garden plots going, and help with the recycling projects.

Digrande keeps himself busy finding and writing grants for all these projects, supervising myself and Lena Foss, getting people excited about our ideas and making regular trips to Bethel for supplies.

On his first trip to Bethel, he bought several large bags of soil, fertilizer, planting pots, a shovel, and 50 pounds of rabbit food. He'll be going back to Bethel soon to get more soil, more planting pots, more rabbit food and hopefully a wheel barrow.

Plants, animals in class

I and several other teachers at Akiak School are busy growing vegetables, flowers, and herbs in the plant stands within their classrooms.

My classroom has become the home for the three adult rabbits and their numerous offspring. Stew had 12 kits on Jan. 7 and Soup had 10 kits on Feb. 6.

The class has two plant stands going full-time with five of the six banks of lights on almost 24 hours a day. When we have a nice sunny day the larger plants are all put up in the windows to take advantage of the free energy and warmth.

We have several large and healthy plants of oregano, basil, parsley, lettuce, cabbage, sage, rosemary, kale, cauliflower and kale going now. We started harvesting parsley and basil this week.

Several bags of soil, the seeds, fertilizer, the hydroponics equipment, and the pallets for compost bins are being stored in my high school classroom along with the worm farm, a goldfish tank, and an aquarium full of Madagascar hissing cockroaches!

Rachelle Templin's fifth- and sixth-grade class has a plant stand in their room with all three banks of lights going almost 24 hours a day. They have all kinds of vegetables growing on their plant stand such as parsnips and Swiss chard.

Their pet rabbit Thumper eats some of the Swiss chard and provides them with valuable fertilizer. Teacher Sharene House is using one of the plant stands in an off-campus house to teach one of her special-needs students some important life skills.

They have Zinnia flowers, green beans and a wide assortment of other vegetables growing successfully. Debbie Anderson, Akiak's second-grade teacher, recently got a plant stand put in her classroom. It will be fun to see what they grow.

Waiting for a greenhouse

Hopefully, high school shop teacher and coach Steve Craft and his class will have time to erect the greenhouse this March once basketball season is over. Once the greenhouse is erected they need to build our compost bins, the tables for the greenhouse, and move a shed up to the school for the rabbit colony and the outdoor compost bins.

Grants from the Diabetes Foundation and helped pay for the greenhouse, a grant from Learn and Serve America will buy hydroponic stations and gardening supplies, and one AmeriCorps position will oversee the greenhouse project for a year.

Whew! Spring is a busy time for all of us as we gear up for spring planting.

What are some of the current and future benefits of all this plant-growing, bunny raising, and recycling? As the people of Akiak eat more fresh vegetables throughout the year we hope to see a decrease in new cases of diabetes and cancer, an increase in the overall physical, dental, and mental health of the people of Akiak.

As the physical and mental health of the students in Akiak increases due to a better diet, more exercise, and a better outlook on life we hope to see an increase in the desire and ability to learn.

Already we are seeing that exposure to the full-spectrum lighting from four of the five plant stands within three of our class rooms is helping to decrease the incidence of depression amongst ourselves and our students. Being able to watch all these baby bunnies grow has lifted the spirits of all who come by to visit our class.

The stress levels of many of our high school and middle school students has lessened as they've found it very therapeutic to hold a baby bunny while doing classwork. In addition, many young people are finding it very relaxing to work with the plants either during transplanting or when planting seeds.

In the future, we hope to hold cooking classes for the youths and adults so that everyone will know how to prepare some of the new herbs and vegetables they are being exposed to.

We hope to see the community of villagers and educators working together for a common goal. We hope to see the town of Akiak become a clean, healthy place for people, animals, and plants.

Lastly, we hope that other villages around us will decide to do some of the same things that we are doing so that the entire Kuskokwim River Delta can become the clean, healthy environment that we all seek.