The second day of the LUNGS Harvest Arts Festival on Sunday was a lot of fun, too.

The weather was perfect for making sun prints. Below, you can see how it works: some pretty leaves or flowers are placed onto a sheet of special photo-paper, covered with a glass plate and exposed to bright sunlight for a few minutes. A bath in water develops the print. Now, the paper turns a lovely indigo blue and the shadow of the leaves is white. 

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In the afternoon, the integrative nutritionist Vanessa Berenstein led the “Garden to Table” workshop. Vanessa used to be one of our gardeners. She works now at the Kaplan Center for Integrative Medicine in Washington DC, where she helps people with chronic pain and illnesses.

Vanessa took us on a foraging tour around the garden. On the way, she told us about the many benefits of basil, which flowers and weeds are edible, why small organic farms are better than big ones (and much better than large conventional factory farms), and about her experience with teaching Harlem school kids to grow and enjoy vegetables. At the end of our tour, we had filled our basket with kale, swiss chard, cucumbers, tomatoes and some apples, and also fennel fronds, chickweed, purslane, some out-of-season asparagus, rose-, marigold- and nasturtium flowers, and lots of herbs.

Everybody helped to chop up this bounty and assemble it into a not just nutritious but also very pretty salad. Finally, Vanessa made a creamy dressing with pistachio butter, lemon juice and spices, which she found to be loved even by picky children. It was indeed delicious.

We are really grateful that Vanessa came all the way from Washington DC for this fantastic workshop.

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With this, the fun was not yet over! Sara had promised to lead a session of laughter yoga. Laughter yoga means to laugh even if nothing is funny — at first. We started with some breathing exercises and then just started laughing: ha-ha-ha-ha. It is a bit awkward in the beginning but it soon becomes hilarious. And it feels good, just like real, spontaneous laughing.

This picture is blurry because the photographer laughed, too.