February Garden Tour

Posted on February 14, 2014 by kidsingardens

Time for a walk around the garden. Leave your jackets at home—it’s 76 degrees here today in Julian.

I picked up these banners at a garage sale in my effort to add holiday touches to the garden.

Miss Lynn added these:

Valentines Day is the rule of thumb for planting peas, and peas we did plant!

Kale is our harvest of the month, and my parent helpers/Garden Beneficials cooked up kale chips at our outdoor kitchen for the fifth graders. One thing I have become convinced of during my tenure as garden teacher—-NUTRITION EDUCATION WORKS! These kids were gobbling down the kale chips, begging for more, asking for the recipe, declaring it to be one of their favorite foods….uh, kale chips!

Harvesting from our new 3×3 beds:

Cooking in our new little convection oven at our outdoor food prep station:

Munching away:

A Farm to School project recently finished! I had sets of banners made for the crops that are grown in San Diego each season. The winter set now enhances the indoor area where children pick up their lunches.

Next to the banners is one of the photographs taken by a student in our after-school photography program Kids with Cameras, identifying the chef behind the meal.

Early start kindergarten and kindergarten students focus on a “letter of the week.” I’m using these empty picture frames to teach garden vocabulary. The students hunt for them, and we learn the name of the object framed. D-d-d-d for daffodil!

Lastly, our district recently received a Live Well San Diego proclamation from our county board of supervisor for our wellness programs. Pictured left to right–County Supervisor Diane Jacob, School Board president Eileen Tellam, Superintendent Kevin Ogden, and me. Also recognized were Teresa and Jeremy Manley who were also present at the meeting.

The end-of-school wrap-up, kinda

Posted on June 15, 2013 by kidsingardens

School’s out! A moment celebrated every year by the “waving to the busses” pulling out for the last time until mid-August.

And so, things were also finishing up in the garden, kinda.

I did a bunch of make-up garden lessons (on peas! surprise!) and came to love the book “First Peas to the Table” by Susan Grigsby about Thomas Jefferson’s annual contest with his neighbors.

We did a lot of mulberry eating.

My senior ambassadors worked on a mosaic stepping stone that will stay in the garden, acknowledging their two years of service.

On the second day of summer, we held our (belated) annual tea party for Administrative Professionals day. I tried to organize it on the actual holiday in May, or thereabouts, but discovered that stealing away all seven of our administrative staff at the same time might inadventently make the school crumble in on itself. These wonderful people make it happen every day, and I love that we’re on our fourth year of celebrating them in the garden.

The new PLUS team (junior high leadership) also came out for a 2-hour service project during the first week of summer, helping to spread woodchips, deadhead herbs and flowers, tear out peas, put in tomatoes and squash, mulch, tidy up the breast cancer awareness ribbon garden, and water.

This is what the ribbon looks like when the daffodil and tulips are out of season. It needs a lot of tidying to keep the shape and outline, made with red bark and white stones.

Ta-dah! What were peas are now tomatoes, the Harvest of the Month for August and September.

And finally, I set up the summer watering schedule for our volunteer families, made exactly 100% easier this year by the fact that my friend and fellow Master Gardener put in timed irrigation to ALL of our edibles. Now we just have to water the ornamentals a couple times a week with rainwater. Thank you dear Mary!

Harvest of the month: peas

Posted on May 11, 2013 by kidsingardens

Next year I will be leading the effort to introduce a Harvest of the Month program at our school. To get it started, we’re doing a pilot this month.

The backbone of this program is a set of excellent resources provided by a Network for a Healthy California (http://www.harvestofthemonth.cdph.ca.gov). For each fruit or vegetable, they provide an educator guide, a parent newsletter, a community handout and a menu template on which you can print your school lunch calendar.

I attended the all-district staff meeting at the beginning of the month to introduce the program and pass out information to the teachers. These multi-page guides have lots of information about the selected fruit or vegetable: nutrition, history, botany, recipes, science, literature links, etc.

During a University of Wednesday class, the children rotated to three stations related to peas. Here’s a craft template I created for an indoor station. (It was windy that day!)

Tip: Michaels has a single pack of cardstock greens in all different shades.

At another station, the students did a set of drawings of peas, which were planted in succession so that they could observe them at different stages of growth—also, to stretch out the harvest.

At my station we sampled sweet pea hummus, and we talked about all of the ingredients. We also did a fennel taste test because I had some to use from our donated produce box.

I’m going to teach more pea-themed lessons this month so I’ve been checking out every children’s book I can find with the word”pea” in the title and creating a working annotated bibliography. I’d love to find a grant to eventually purchase every title on the list.

We also made some decorations for the garden to announce the monthly harvest. Here our 8th grade PLUS leadership kids are finishing up a banner started by the fourth grade.

This is a banner I had printed locally.

And finally, a taste test! Snap peas were in our Be Wise Box this week, and I supplemented them with 2 lbs. from the Warner Springs Farmers Market I visited last night. An ambassador took data (“”Do you like it?”), and once again, the peas have it!

Garden Tour, April 2013

Posted on April 9, 2013 by kidsingardens

Join me as we take our periodic stroll around the garden!

Junior High students often change the message on the blackboard hung in their garden. Yes, welcome indeed!

I might have mentioned we are planting a lot of peas to get ready for our first Harvest of the Month program in May. (Pinecones are to discourage critters from walking in the bed.)

As we were harvesting the broccoli, one child told me she didn’t know that the part of broccoli we eat is curled up flowers. I told her we’d leave one plant in the ground to flower so she could see for herself.

Broccoli is also coming up in one of our container gardens. That’s one of the funny things about school gardens—mystery plants! (Someone, at some time, had an idea, a vision, a spare plant…who knows?)

The strawberry plants look luscious. Keep. meaning. to. enclose. them. in. nets.

The tulips are finally up in the breast cancer awareness ribbon. Watching them bloom took on new meaning for me this year as two very brave and beautiful friends of mine have kicked cancer’s butt in the last year.

New child-created signage on the bulletin board on the CATCH nutrition concept: go, slow and whoa foods.

We’ve been moving native strawberries out of this prime veggie growing location to the hillside around the fruit trees, as a move toward a permaculture fruit tree guild. We hadn’t moved all of them by Science Day though so I split the bed to make some room for pea planting, pinning back the strawberries with some white picket fencing we keep moving around the garden. Cute!

Someone donated this flag last year, and we fly it—announcing our allegiance to daffodils!

Mrs. Shull’s fourth grade class peas. Each child did a letter on an index card, I laminated them and kids taped them to bamboo skewers.

We have a gazillion wildflower seeds in the garden, from seed ball making activities, former projects, etc. Wildflowers have a special immunity in our garden. Wherever they want to pop up, we gladly let them stay.

This little donated table broke. No worrries. With a tree stump standing in, it makes another cozy little spot to hang out in the garden.

A local grape grower trimmed these for us! Our first crop this fall? (Stay tuned.)

Look who decided to bloom. (Oh little wisteria, you have no idea how close you were to being uprooted.)

Our honeysuckle reading teepee. Last week a child sitting inside yelled, “Mrs. Elisara! Come here! There’s a chrysallis at the top of the teepee!” Sure enough, a butterfly-to-be was dangling from the ceiling. (The president of the entomology club later ID’ed it.)

If you’re not familiar with Box Tops, they are the little pink coupons found on hundreds of products. Schools collect them and mail them in, receiving 10 cents for each one. It adds up, and at our school, the proceeds have been earmarked for the garden. Twice a year we receive a check. Here’s what we bought with our latest earnings: pea trellises, bean towers, seed starting mix, trays, compost, and our 3×3 raised bed frame.

Finally, it’s always good to step back and get the big picture!

Science Day in the garden

Posted on April 3, 2013 by kidsingardens

Last Thursday was Science Day at our school during which students went from “station” to “station” spread across campus for science-based lessons. For example, San Diego Country Office of Education brought their traveling Splash Lab (microscopes and chemistry experiments) and Green Machine (soils, integrated pest management, water cycle) programs.

Almost every student passed through the garden for a 30-minute class. In the morning, we had the younger classes combined by grade so I divided the children into groups with an adult (teacher, parent, and/or aid) and explained that they would go to 5 different stations for 5 minutes each. Each station was set up with a clipboard of simple instructions and the necessary equipment. I went from group to group to answer questions, point things out and re-set materials.

Station One: Planting Peas

Station Two: Watering peas

Other classes had already planted peas in other beds. At this station kids observed their growth and watered.

Station Three: Storytime

Station Four: Smelling herbs

Station Five: Looking for habitat elements

Mrs. White demonstrating how our beautiful fountain turns on when she holds the panel to the sun. A wonderful day for hands-on learning!

Seed packet literacy

Posted on March 15, 2013 by kidsingardens

To continue with my pea-brained ideas….

For Wednesday’s garden class, I had the class plant a bed of peas. Before we went out to the garden, we talked about “how to read a seed packet.” I copied the front and back of a packet and added questions around the perimeter. This was our opening activity.

Notice how the students have to look closely for the information in order to answer the question. To answer the question on trellises, they have to notice the adjective “self-supporting.” To know what days we should expect a pea, they have to find the “days to maturity.”

Then I gave each child a different seed packet. (I have lots, obviously.) I then asked them to form a line across the room, based on the name of their flower/vegetable, in alphabetical order. They had to talk to each other and shuffle themselves, A to Z. When they were in place, I asked them to read off their seed name, to see if we got it right! Then we did it again, according to “days to maturity” with one end of the spectrum being the shortest, the other the longest. It was fun to compare radishes at one end with onions at the other.

At that point, we had to get planting, but you could keep going with this game, having the kids line up according to planting depth, Latin names, months to plant, etc. Each one will demonstrate the different needs of plants as well as help kids look closely at all that information on a seed packet.

5 reasons to mind your peas

Posted on February 27, 2013 by kidsingardens

Peas are perfect in school gardens because:

1) They come in their own wrappers. In terms of food safety—-winners!

2) Peas are one of those foods whose “fresh” version and “canned” version are radically different. If you’ve only had those nasty little canned ones, fresh peas seem like a whole new food.

3) You can’t plant enough peas. My experience is that kids love to search for them on the vine, pop them open and eat. Every year I plant them I resolve to plant ten times more the following year.

4) As nitrogen-fixing legumes, you can chop up the plants after they’ve produced and dig them in to improve the soil.

5) Peas can be put in the ground early (Valentines Day here in Julian) so kids can plant and harvest during the school year. (Because some vegetables ripen in the summer, plants whose entire cycle can be observed during the traditional school calendar are great.)

As part of our “emerging” Farm to School program, I am working to choose a “crop of the month” for our school and align it as much as possible with a planting and harvesting schedule for the garden. We will also be incorporating the excellent matching resources of “Harvest of the Month” in garden lessons.

Naturally, our first crop will be peas for May.

To start, I bought every variety of pea I could find! Here are a few: