Garden Camp Week 1: Soil!

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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, that take the nutrients from the soil and transport them up to the rest of the plant; nutrients like nitrogen, which the chickpeas in our hummus helped make available in the soil through nitrogen fixation.

After snack, the older group learned about the Dust Bowl and how poor soil management combined with drought led to a serious soil erosion event that devastated farms and farmer livelihoods across the United States. The younger group did a soil experiment to investigate the different components of soil, and then a whole bunch of them turned into trees, burying their feet-roots in the sandy soil outside our greenhouse.




Thanks to our gardeners for a brilliant (& soil-smudged) first day of Garden Camp. And thank you to Anna, Annie, Cammie, and countless others for making this happen! We're excited to see what further adventures the summer brings. 

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