By Craig T. Kojima, Star-Bulletin
Manoa Elementary third graders, from left, Andrea Carter,
Chloe Tanaka and Darin Tanaka, examine Carrie Supnet's
homemade peanut brittle, cooling in split banana stalks.
T HERE'S a lot that kids can learn in the classroom, but there are a few things that have to be experienced rather than studied in books. Harvest festival
sows learningChildren get back to the Earth
at the Urban Garden CenterThe Urban Garden Center in Pearl City gave that opportunity to 1,500 third graders recently during their 4th annual Harvest Festival. What the children learned was more than how peanuts grow or when you harvest corn -- they learned how families lived on Oahu when a quarter was more money than most children ever had at one time.
Organized by county extension agents Dale Sato and Maryknoll Spotkaeff of the Oahu Cooperative Extension Service, a function of the University of Hawaii's College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, the festival would have been impossible to stage without the help of more than 50 volunteers. All of the people mentioned here gave their time and experience to ensure the success of the event.
A crowd pleaser was Carrie Supnet, who held the third graders spellbound as she told them how peanuts were grown in the Maui plantation village where she grew up, and how the small kids made candy from them.
"When I was a child, we had no money to buy candy," she told them as she mixed raw brown sugar with water. "My brothers would pick the peanuts from the garden -- everybody had a garden, and a peanut patch, so we wouldn't have to buy so much at the store. Then my brothers would make a fire. We used a Crisco tin to cook in, and we melted raw sugar just like this, sugar that had been washed but not refined. It has big crystals, just like Hawaiian salt."
She stirred the sugar and water over a portable gas flame while her assistants Betty Oishi and Margaret Terakawa shelled the fresh peanuts. "Nobody had candy thermometers in those days, but we knew just when the syrup dripped off the edge of the wooden spoon and it was ready. Then we'd add the peanuts and drop out spoonsful of the candy to let it cool and harden. They did have wax paper and cookie sheets, but we couldn't afford them, so where did we cool the candy where it wouldn't stick to the plate?" Supnet asked the kids. They didn't know.
"We took banana stalks, the trunks of the trees, and cut them in half. We laid them on a table and dropped the hot candy into the cut stalk. It cooled and it didn't stick, and we had homemade peanut brittle." Supnet demonstrated the technique as she talked, and then Joe Mori showed the kids how peanuts grow while the candy cooled.
Peanuts grow best in warm sunny places and in sandy, well-fertilized soil. After the bright yellow flowers fade, a long stalk develops at the base of each flower and grows down into the soil where the peanuts develop underground. "This has been a bad year for peanuts," Mori told the third graders, "because we didn't have much rain out here. Peanuts are 45 to 50 percent water, and without enough water, they just dry up."
By now the candy had hardened, and the Manoa School children who happened to make up this group politely stood in line and properly thanked Supnet for the candy.
Each school had an identifying T-shirt worn by all of its students so groups could keep track of each other. The Manoa Tigers shirts, with a tiger smiling from the front of the shirt and his paw print on the back, were winners.
Near the peanut patch was a stand of corn where Nancy and Ralph Lee were running a Ring the Corncob game that showed the children how healthy corn grows. Each child was given a small hoop, as at a carnival game, and asked to ring one of three ears of corn standing on spikes 10 feet away. They got the most points for ringing the golden ripe corn, while the brown corn that hadn't had enough water and the green corn that needed fertilizer got fewer points.
Nearby, Julie and Reuben Flores were turning out tortillas to the delight of August Ahrens students. "This place has more free handouts than Costco," said one teacher as she munched on the Flores' tortilla chips.
"My parents came from Mexico," Reuben Flores told his young audience, "and I watched them make tortillas when I was growing up. You use a flour made from corn, and you mix it with water. Then you roll the dough out," he said, and he gave each of the children a piece of dough the size of a golf ball. They patted the lump flat and then Julie Flores cut it into strips that she cooked in hot oil. "Better than Doritos," said one satisfied customer.
Asked what she liked best about the day on the farm, a girl from Barbers Point said, "The eggplant."
It seemed like an odd choice, so she was asked why. "I don't like to eat eggplant. It's all squooshy and gray, but my mom cooks it sometimes. I never knew how pretty it was when it was growing on the little bushes. It hangs there like a big ornament."
The Urban Garden is open free to the public the first Saturday of each month. The next open morning is Nov. 7. There won't be any festival events, but there will be volunteers to answer your gardening questions and show you the hundreds of different plants that will grow on Oahu. You'll be amazed at how pretty eggplant is.
The garden can always use more volunteers. If you'd like to lend a hand, call Karen Nakagawa at 453-6050.
Urban Garden Center
What: Open morning
Gardening Calendar in Do It Electric!
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