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!!

Starting Plants

This year we tried to start our own seeds to put in our garden. We had some seeds harvested from last year. I also purchased some seeds at Home Depot. We started watermelon, cucumbers, peppers, and tomatoes. We tried making our own biodegradable planters. We started by ripping about 4 inch strips of newspaper. We then rolled it around a water bottle leaving about 1 1/2 inches of paper on the bottom and folded that up to close up the bottom. We then added two Dixie cups of potting soil and planted a few seeds in each. In retrospect, we should have compacted the soil a bit better and added more. I then placed them on a tray in our display case with a fluorescent bulb just above the pots and kept them watered.

I am not sure why, but only about half of our plants germinated. The students were kind of disappointed but I explained that not everything works out the way we want.

Storms!

Whew! Last night we had quite the storms. We had high winds, torrential rain, and tornado warnings!!!!! After the storm cleared, I drove around and decided to check on the garden. As I approached, my heart sank a little. The wind had bent many things on their side. I thought the smaller stuff should be ok, but my biggest concerns were the tomatoes and corn. The tomatoes were so heavy the prior to today, they were leaning to the north. When I arrived, they were leaning to the south. I would say almost a 180 degree difference! The next thing I saw was the corn. They were laying to the south with no greater than a 45 degree between stalk and ground. I attempted to stand them up, but they just kept leaning back over. I was somewhat successful, but we had more storms later that evening.

I am hoping that mother nature will work her wonders and the corn will straighten up, but I will be preparing for the worst and will begin prepping the children for the loss on Friday.

Wish me luck!

Harvest!

The garden has been growing amazingly! Last time I wrote we had tried our radishes. Since then things have really started growing like crazy.

The kids have been helping keep track of temperatures and rainfall. I have a hi/low thermometer and have currently been relying on the weather channel for rainfall. We try to graph a few times per week, but don't count weekends (except for precipitation). We have had a wet summer, on some of the weekends we have had to spread out our precipitation data because it exceeded the limits of our graph!

We finally had a day where we were able to pick some green beans. The kids loved getting to pick them and eat them right off the vine! Some of them even kept some to bring in and share with those who decided not to join us.

We also got to pick some cucumbers. We picked 8 cucumbers. The kids helped measure them and our smallest was 7.5" and our longest was 11.5". The kids then estimated how many seeds were in the cucumbers. Our guess averaged in the 200's. I then sliced it and gave each kid 4 slices. Before they could eat them, they had to count how many seeds were in each slice. We came up with about 264 seeds! We did pretty good with our estimating! The kids were really excited to be picking!

Knee High by the 4th of July

We are coming up on the 4th of July weekend. Our garden is growing well! Two weeks ago, we were able to harvest our radishes. The kids got to try them and you can only imagine the results! Some kids loved them while others ran to the bathroom! I wish I would have remembered the camera that day!

As you can tell by the title and our picture, Our corn is just about knee high right now. We are well on our way to a good harvest. Everything is looking great! The kids are really excited about how the garden is turning out.

I will try to update more frequently and remember pictures as the kids are trying the products of their work!

First Week of Summer Club

Well, we just finished our first week of our summer program. We have had a lot of rain this past week! We're probably around the 2 inch mark. This has really helped our garden get growing and has helped me to not have to haul the hydrant meter out to the hydrant too often.

Our plants are growing really well! When we were adding fertilizer today, we notice some peppers are growing and we have cuccumbers growing too! Our radishes are starting to bulge out of the soil. Corn is looking nice and should hopefully be knee high by the 4th of July!

To help support our climbing beans, I bought some 1 in x 1in animal cage wire. I created an arch between two beds and the beans are starting to climb right up! The kids love our little "cave" we've started!

It looks like we are in for some decent storms tonight. I hope the garden can survive!

The garden takes root!

I finally have pictures today. Because I don't have permission to post student pictures, I will need to cover up faces.

Well, it has been awhile since posting...again. But I have some good news! The gardens are built and partially planted. We created 5 3'x5'x6" beds and we placed them 2 feet apart. The lumber and the deck screws cost me about $102 from our local Home Depot. I was able to get compost from the local golf course that I work at so that didn't cost us anything!

We built the gardens on Tuesday and planted them on Wednesday. We planted little gem lettuce, Mammoth melting snow pea, bush garden beans, and radishes from seed. I learned a neat way to get the kids to measure out the proper planting distances. You need to get a roll of toilet paper and roll it out to the desired length. Once this was done, I had the partners (4th grade and older students partnered with 3rd grade and younger students) take a ruler and measure out the proper spacing. Once the students were comfortable with their measuring skills, they took a bottle of school glue and put just a tiny dab on the paper and placed the seed on top avoiding covering the entire seed with glue. We then dug small trenches, placed the seed paper in the soil and gently covered it up. The kids had a blast doing this!

We also transplanted some plants. This year I purchased them from a local green house, but next year I hope to create a cold frame and start our own seeds! We planted sweet million tomatoes, WI 55 tomatoes, green and red peppers, several varieties of cuccumbers (one bush variety), and watermelon. We forgot to measure the height of the plants when we planted, so we will need to remember to do that Friday.

The students also started garden journals/logs. We will be keeping track of rainfall once I get a good rain gauge and high and low temperature.

Looking forward to keeping you up to date!

Getting Started

I am a service member with the Marshfield Clinic AmeriCorps. I serve at an elementary school in Wisconsin Rapids. I work with the kids during the school day and help out with the Boys and Girls Club unit right at our school. We provide afterschool programming and also have a program during the summer. A few months ago, I attended a training provided by the UW-Extension called "Got Dirt?" about gardening in school. This sounded like a great idea! I have finally gotten the O.K. from the head of Buidling and Grounds to proceed with the planning of the garden! I am hoping to work with the kids tonight to start getting things in motion. Hopefully they will take it and run with it! I look forward to keeping this updated with the progress we are making and get some pictures going!