Thursday, March 31, 2011
Teaching in the Garden
I have so many ideas for how to teach in the garden. And not just lessons about digging weeds and filling the bird feeders :). Virtually every subject has roots (he he) in the garden. Reading/Writing/Spelling, we can read gardening books and learn vocabulary words, write our own short stories and daydream the day away. Math~ we can count types of flowers, find patterns in nature and in our plantings, learn to identify nature things, make maps and a wide variety of graphs. Science, well everything happening outside in the garden is science. Health can be covered by discussing the physical aspect of outdoor labor and learn about the healthy vegetables and fruits we can grow. Occupation Education, hmmm… well, we can be farmers or learn about manual labor. If we identify our plants and insects by their Latin name we’ve got a foreign language covered. We can discuss different types of crops and where they grow, and what the people are like that grow them ~ Social Studies! Appreciation of music is a little bit more difficult, we could sing while we work, although whistling would be more appropriate! We can take a radio out and listen to music, that’ll work. For history, we can talk about hunting and gathering and the changes made through time to growing crops. Look at that, in just 5 minutes I was able to think of how to cover all necessary 11 subjects while working in the garden!
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Garden Markers for Planting a Rainbow
We've been so excited to start planting our garden, ever since we read, "Planting a Rainbow." After our trip to the store to get our "rainbow" seeds, we decided we needed rainbow markers to label our garden. Today we painted and glued wooden flowers together. We are going to use them as plant markers in the kids garden.
We bought the wooden flower cut-outs at the Dollar Tree (10 for a dollar) and used acrylic paints with foam brushes.
The girls started with their favorite colors, blue for Abby and pink for Selena.
Pretty soon we had a little rainbow factory!
Now, all we need are some little plants. We are planting our seeds on Friday, April 1st!
Garden Pre-work
Tuesday, March 29th
Since we are going to be starting our seeds on Friday, and finally digging out the dahlia tubers to get them eye'd up, it was time to get the greenhouse dug out of the garage. I should have taken a before picture, but I'll do my best to explain what it looked like. Last Memorial Day, we carried the frame of the greenhouse to the garage to dry out. After placing it in the garage and removing the plastic, I realized that it would make a nice little storage area. So, for the last 9 months, the greenhouse has been storage shelves for the garage. Thankfully most of what was in and on it was gardening pots, tools, soils, mixes, and the like. So it was all stuff that would be needed. Unfortunately it was in the middle of the garage, so I had to move my summer tires around, all the pots (still with soil in them since it froze so early and the soil was solid!), tricycles, strollers, and box after box of winter stored tubers. I got the greenhouse moved out, the garage organized, the pots arranged to be re-potted! All in about 2 hours. Now the greenhouse sits in the backyard, naked, until I get the yard thatched, so I can get it staked down and the plastic put on. I hope the weather is good this weekend so I can get those things done! I can't believe that Friday is APRIL!
Since we are going to be starting our seeds on Friday, and finally digging out the dahlia tubers to get them eye'd up, it was time to get the greenhouse dug out of the garage. I should have taken a before picture, but I'll do my best to explain what it looked like. Last Memorial Day, we carried the frame of the greenhouse to the garage to dry out. After placing it in the garage and removing the plastic, I realized that it would make a nice little storage area. So, for the last 9 months, the greenhouse has been storage shelves for the garage. Thankfully most of what was in and on it was gardening pots, tools, soils, mixes, and the like. So it was all stuff that would be needed. Unfortunately it was in the middle of the garage, so I had to move my summer tires around, all the pots (still with soil in them since it froze so early and the soil was solid!), tricycles, strollers, and box after box of winter stored tubers. I got the greenhouse moved out, the garage organized, the pots arranged to be re-potted! All in about 2 hours. Now the greenhouse sits in the backyard, naked, until I get the yard thatched, so I can get it staked down and the plastic put on. I hope the weather is good this weekend so I can get those things done! I can't believe that Friday is APRIL!
Pictures from 2010 Garden
A few pictures from our 2010 garden.
The beginnings of the SFG (Square Foot Garden)
The SFG a week later
The first sprouts!
The first sprouts!
Beautiful Iris
Happy Bleeding Heart
My Narrows Tricia Dahlia, won Best of Show at the Fair.
A vase of cut dahlias.
Introduction
Every year we have a garden, and every year we start out really well with keeping track of what is going on, then it tapers off, sometime during letting the weeds get ahead of us, or staking and tying the dahlias... We love all of it! This year I hope that the girls are old enough to help me (remind me) to keep better track of what is happening in the garden.
Happy growing everyone!
Happy growing everyone!
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