yound_stewards
Middle-school students gleaned apples at Aggie and Walter Murch's orchard last Friday, part of a new school program.   Teresa Mathew

Under last Friday’s early October sun, a handful of Bolinas schoolchildren huddled under trees in a nearby orchard, filling buckets and expectant mouths with a dozen apple varieties. Out by the Pine Gulch Creek, another group of students cleared out invasive species. One girl passed a ball of black pond earth back and forth between her hands before smearing an environmental Ash Wednesday benediction on the forehead of her classmate. 

The students were participating in…