How Does My Garden Grow?

07 June 2012

Hello Friends,

I spent most of the day yesterday working in my school garden. In July, I am taking a class that is about gardening with children. It is one of those classes where you take all the classroom hours in one week spending time from 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. with the instructor. Then you have 3 - 4 weeks to write the paper or do the project. Well, my family and I will be driving back from our summer vacation on the first day of class, so I wrote the instructor and asked if I could still be allowed to attend despite the fact that I would be missing the first day. She wrote back and said, "Of course! To make up for the lost time, though, I would like to bring the class out to your school garden and I would like for you to do a presentation and lesson plan about your garden." Yikes! This was more than I bargained for! :) So....... since a class of teachers will be visiting my garden, I thought that I had better make sure that it is alive and well when we visit in July! I have some ideas for making it interactive for kids and will share those ideas when I have them refined. In the mean time, here are some pictures of what is happening currently in the garden. If you have been following me since January, you will notice something familiar about the scarecrow. He was our polar bear pal for our Polar unit! I took these pictures at dusk, so that is the reason for the darkness.

Here is a picture of Pumpkin Jack. He is getting big! The kids also planted some pumpkin seeds the last week of school and they are finally coming up!

A wonderful parent built a raised bed for us and the perennials that we planted last year came back! My students also planted marigolds and surprisingly (despite the HOT weather we had at the end of May), some of them survived! I planted herbs in one section of the bed. I wanted herbs that had a strong smell that the kids would be able to smell when we return to school in August. They are: basil, lavender, sage, lemon verbena, and parsley. I also planted some annual flowers just to give the garden some color. The corn that the kids planted is also coming up!

Because we have a rabbit problem, I tried to create a barrier to keep the rabbits from tasting the herbs. You know those old computer CD's that are outdated and take up space in your classroom? Well, I took a few of them and strung them together. Then I attached them to a dowel rod and stuck the rod into the ground. Hopefully the motion of the CD's and the reflection off their backs might detract a few rabbits! I also cut the bottom out of a plastic shopping bag and attached that to the top of the supports as another way to scare away varmits! ;)

We have heard so much about the loss of honey bee populations - at least here in farm country, we have been hearing about it! So I am always on the look out for these little creatures and tonight, there was a little girl gathering pollen from our flowers! I tried to take a picture of her, but my photography skills are pretty amateurish!