BES Garden Club

What part of a plant is best suited to breakfast? Turns out our gardeners eat mostly seeds and fruits first thing in the morning!  This week at Garden Camp we explored the parts of plants that we grow and harvest for our meals - what purpose each part serves for the plant, and how that purpose contributes to the nutrition found in our food. After making a list of what plant parts our breakfasts could be traced back to, Anna led us into the garden to see what plant parts we could make into a snack. Throughout the morning, we harvested leaves (lettuce), stems and flowers (broccoli), modified stems & leaves (garlic), and roots (radishes) from the garden to make into a nutrient-packed salad. Anna brought along some more roots (carrots), seeds (from pumpkins and sunflowers), and fruit (cucumbers) to make our salad represent the full spectrum of what plants can offer us in taste, texture, color, and nutrition. Our picnic tables became chef's counters

Summer's here, and so is garden camp! The morning of the solstice, that seemingly eternal spring fog cleared and our summer gardeners showed up for the first day of what will be a summer-long gardening & literacy program here at the Brooksville Elementary School garden. This week, we began at the beginning - by studying the soil that grows our fruits, vegetables, grains, herbs, and flowers. The gardeners started out in a circle around Bed 1 with its sunflowers, peas, and volunteer garlic, drawing and writing about what they saw in the soil. Then the younger group went to read about soil and explore the "-oil" word family with Mrs. Lepper while the older group set up an experiment about the effects of soil composition on lettuce seedlings. For our snack break, Anna made us hummus to dip carrots & cucumbers in! As we munched, Anna talked about how root vegetables like carrots are the plant parts we eat that are in most direct contact with the soil, th

     Boy, what a hot day to work in the garden!  Nevertheless, we had a very productive afternoon. We harvested the rest of the spinach (out of greenhouse bed 1) for the school lunch program, pulled out the old plants.   Lots of the spinach looked great, but we discovered some aphids on some, and some leaf miners on others. We then transplanted some cucumbers, since we didn't have great germination of the seeds we planted- only two had come up.   We also planted a zucchini plant.      We transplanted basil into greenhouse bed 2, where there are already tomatoes and parsley.   This will be the "pizza bed".      We inter planted  strawberry plants in garden bed 4.  A few radishes were eaten in the process!      We also weeded garden bed 1, leaving the peas that had germinated, as well as the sunflower volunteers and garlic volunteers, and planted some more peas.

The gardeners finally ate the carrots! We planted brassica seeds: kale, cabbage, broccoli, and Brussel sprouts,  for a late summer and fall crop.   We planted provider bush bean seeds in garden bed 7. We planted caribou russet seed potatoes in garden bed 3.   We harvested lettuce for the school lunch program, for Ms. Pike, and for gardeners to take home. We added compost and organic fertilizer to gh bed 2 and transplanted tomatoes and calendula. And there was plenty of time to play!

Gardeners harvested every last bit of kale, broccoli, and kale rabe from greenhouse bed 3.  They either ate it or took it home.  They then pulled all the plants out of the bed.  During the next couple of days the 5/6 graders will remove the soil and demolish the bed.  The wood is rotten.   The sills of the greenhouse are also rotten and are due to be replaced with lumber that was sawn up on site during discovery week.  Once the sills are replaced we will rebuild the garden bed.