This summer, the Verde Valley School plans to open its doors for a weekly community event: Summer on the Farm.
Along with local students, farm manager Michael Spielman will be hosting the event. He hopes that each Wednesday night from 5 to 9 p.m., community members will come out to the farm for wood-fired pizza, movies, local artists, music and of course, the farm’s produce.
The farm, located at the school off of Verde Valley School road, already partners with farmer markets and restaurants in the area, however, the plan for the Summer on the Farm series is to expand the school’s interaction within the community.
“We have the venue and it’s a beautiful place,” Spielman said. “Now we just want to bring in people so that whatever issues the community is facing, we are just hosting, making pizza and connecting them with our students and school.”
Spielman headed up the farm program nearly 10 years ago. In combination with other teachers, Spielman leads classes involving seed planting, harvesting and farm management, which contributes to the schools dining hall, as well as the compost program — which directly comes from the dining hall waste.
“The kids love the program now and what the farm has become,” Spielman said. “There are about 35 out of our 95 kids who interact with either the farm, compost or land program.”
Students are excited to talk about their projects, from picking ingredients to use on their pizza, cooked in their new wood-burning pizza oven to having former students help build a new flagstone patio. Their enthusiasm is evident.
On May 24, one former student returned for the pizza and farm tour kickoff, checking on the plants and to ask Spielman’s advice on working in organic farming overseas — VVS is an international boarding school.
The farm is complete with a variety of herbs, spices, vegetables and fruit — offering enough ingredients for the students to make creative recipes — including pizza topped with mint. Over the acreage, the farmland is divided into an orchard, greenhouses, seed houses and many different plant sections.
“Everything in here is either edible, medicinal or a pollinator plant of some kind,” Spielman said. “So it reached ecosystem management, not just straight agriculture. You can see all the buzzers and insects around.”
The Summer on the Farm begins on Wednesday, June 22, and Spielman hopes this event will take place every week throughout the year, in his words, “forever.”
Pizza can be purchased at a first-come, first-served basis. All the profits from the pizzas will go directly to the live entertainment, who are either artists or musicians from the area. The new flagstone patio is the designated area for the pizza oven, seating, displays from local artists and a movie screen.
While many of the details such as prices and schedules, are still being worked out, Spielman hopes to get as many community members interested in the event as possible.
