Sprouts

Our seeds are off to a great start!  Well, at least some of them.  Over our spring break a few of our plants perished.  Our kids are still enjoying going outside and weeding the beds during our morning social skills group.  This weekend we will be adding some compost to our current beds to freshen them up from the winter.

We try watering the plants every few days.  The containers we are using allow us to put enough water to last a few days to be sucked up through the egg cartons.A full length view of one of our growing operations.

The plants seem a bit leggy but hopefully they will still be ok!

Spring Cleaning

  Our plants have sprouted and are doing well.  We had spring break last week and a few of our seedlings perished, but most managed to survive the week.  Since we couldn't get in to school, We filled our plastic containers with water and hoped that the egg cartons would allow enough water in to keep our plants hydrated.  I would say it was a success.

The past few weeks have given us a great taste of spring.  Warm temperatures in the day and mild temperatures at night have gotten us into the gardening mood.  As we met with some of our students yesterday, we asked them what they thought would be the next step with our garden.  As expected, several of them said to take the plants outside.  Thankfully, we just had a light frost that morning which made it easier to explain to them that it isn't time to plant outside yet.  Instead, we gathered some tools and began to work and weed the soil to prepare it for planting.

The kids also mentioned that we should expand our garden.  We will be looking into that.  By expanding the garden, we hope to get our school families more involved by adopting a garden plot of two so they can garden as a family.  We will keep you updated on that!

We're Back!

Well, after taking a little time away from the blog I have made my way back to recording our garden progress. The difference this year is that I am no longer an AmeriCorps Service Member. I am now working full time as a special education aide at the same school. The care of the garden also shifted over from being a part of AmeriCorps and Boys & Girls Club to our special education classroom.

Today and tomorrow we will be starting our seeds as part of our morning social skills group. We are using egg cartons for our "pods." First we cut the cartons in half to make them 2x3 cells. Then we soaked them in water for a bit and placed three of them in clear plastic containers about the size of a shoe box. Then the students filled the cells with potting soil, planted one kind of seed in each row and watered them.

We started: watermelon, cukes, beefsteak tomato, broccoli, cherry tomato, peppers, and marigolds. Supposedly the marigolds can be used as pest deterrents. We haven't had any issues yet, so it will be hard to tell if it really works that well.

We also "planted" seeds in plastic sandwich bags with  wet paper towel in them to see the seeds germinating.  It will also give us an idea of gap between germination and when the plants start to emerge from the soil.

Should be fun!!