Garden Camp Week 5: Pollinators

By -

Hello from the garden! We've been busy bees at garden camp, and with wild & cultivated flowers blooming all around us, it seemed like the perfect time to turn our attention to our dear friends and garden teammates: pollinators! 

Humans have been farming for about 10,000 years, but pollinators have been co-evolving with flowering plants for about 100 million years. The friendship between animals and plants who produce flowers & fruit is truly ancient, and the pollinating animals we studied today are still carrying out this time-honored practice of trading their ability to pollinate for flowers' tasty nectar and pollen. And we rely on this partnership for so much of what we eat! 



We began the day by studying a collection of flowering and fruiting plants from gardens and roadsides alike, talking about how the different traits of flowers (size, color, scent, shape, when they bloom) match up with the type of animal that pollinates them. We learned that pollinators like bees, butterflies, moths, and hummingbirds each pollinate flowers that evolved to suite their needs and preferences. Without this process of pollen moving from the stamen of one flower to the pistil of another, we wouldn't have many of the fruits we enjoy eating so much, like squash, cucumbers, apples, and blueberries. 

The gardeners drew the different parts of these flowers in their journals. And, of course, it wouldn't be Garden Camp if we didn't eat our specimens. 

Sampling nasturtiums


Drawing calendula, day lilies, and poppies


What began as eating some of our edible flower samples turned into a full-on pollinator picnic, complete with apples, bread with oats (wind-pollinated) and sunflower seeds (bee-pollinated), and a super special treat: honeycomb! Bees build these elegant hexagonal (six-sided) cells out of wax that they produce from special glands in their bodies. They then use the cells to lay their eggs and store all the honey they make.



We also snacked on strawberries, courtesy of pollinators. And just as our natural specimens become snacks, our snacks become specimens! As we ate, we smushed our strawberries on our picnic paper so that when the juice dries up, we're left with the seeds, which we can plant next season!




After our snack, the gardeners spent the rest of the morning putting together a special Garden Edition of WBES, BES's very own news station. They put together an outline of topics we have covered at Garden Camp so far and started filming! 




That's a wrap for this week. Before we go, we'd like to mention that an incredible cedar post fence is underway at the BES school garden, in addition to several other landscaping and greenhouse upgrades. Many thanks to Annie, Rob, Jason, Brian, and everyone else helping to make this garden even more beautiful (and protected from our deer neighbors)!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to the BES Garden Club Blog!

By -
Image
This blog will keep you up to date on the BES garden! On Tuesday's garden club members work in the garden during lunch recess.  On Friday's grade three and four students are welcome to work in the garden during 20 point time.   From time to time classes do integrative gardening projects that are linked to their class curriculum.   Here are a couple of photos from the third and fourth grade unit on paperwhites.   We grew them to sell at the Winter Faire and learned about bulbs, economics, and biomes.
Read more

Garden Camp Week 6: Plants as Medicine

By -
Image
Long before we had hospitals or the kinds of doctors many of us visit today, humans relied on plants, and a keen understanding of their properties, to treat many of our maladies and discomforts. This week we explored some of the plants that we grow and that grow wild around our town that have healing properties - in other words, plants that we can use as medicine! We looked at plants that don't grow wild, but that we can grow in gardens, such as chamomile, calendula, oats, and lavender, as well as plants that grow wild in Maine (even though none of these are native to our state): St. John's wort, mullein, mint, plantain, and stinging nettles. The wild card of the day was cinnamon: did you know that it comes from the bark of a tree that grows in Sri Lanka, India, Myanmar, and Bangladesh? And it's not only for flavoring apple pie; it's also said to help lower blood sugar.  Once we got to know the medicinal plants laid out on the table, we started processing t
Read more

Garden Camp Week 2: Plant Parts

By -
Image
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
Read more