Trellis Building

April 18th
If you learn anything from Mel Bartholomew's famous gardening book, 'Square Foot Gardening', it is to grow plants UP.  If space is limited, training plants onto some sort of structure and making use of the vertical space can increase your yield tremendously.  Rather than water pipes or electrical conduits that Mel uses, we opted to make trellises out of wood to match our rustic fence posts.

After a bit of online research, I settled on a simple, free, A-frame design. The address to this website is: http://www.vegetablegardener.com/item/8315/diy-a-frame-veggie-trellis.

 Upon David River's suggestion, I approached Resource, the recycled building materials company on Arapahoe for a donation of untreated lumber and hardware.  They were happy to oblige, so one snowy morning, with the help of a friendly Resource employee named Mark, I managed to rustle up several pieces of pine and sets of door hinges for the trellises.  Thank you Resource!

After the mismatched pieces were cut to size by Bill (my better half), David, Daniel and Belinda helped create trellises with the kids at the school.  As we brought out the cordless drills, staple guns, hammers and screw drivers, I could sense a keen interest in the kids.  David and the parent volunteers patiently showed the kids how to use these tools and the kids cooperated together to build the structures.  Making something with your hands that will impact many people is very rewarding.  I hope the kids will feel this way when the garden's vegetables make their appearance in the school's salad bar in May.

 

Hoophouse!

Leo looks out from the hoophouse. Photo: Theresa Diaz

April 22nd,
Earth Day!  Garden group has much to celebrate on this day in which we honor our wonderful planet.
The hoophouse which was purchased from funds won in the Clorox Green Works contest is taking shape in the garden.  Michele and her contractor friend from Harlequin Gardens have spent many hours building the structure.  The hoophouse will extend the growing season so that vegetables can be harvested throughout the year.  Thank you garden supporters, Amy Thompson and Michele for making this a reality!

On earth day, Heatherwood students and staff received a packet of seeds from bbbseed, a seed company located in Gunbarrel.  These are non-genetically modified seeds that are open pollinated and represent heirloom varieties of vegetables.  To learn more about this company, visit http://www.bbbseed.com.  PTO and Garden group worked together to make this generous donation available to the school. Thank you bbbseed!

Planting

April 11th

Today we went out to the garden and planted lettuce, spinach, pansies and peas.  All but the peas were plant starts grown from seeds that Michele and I planted in a soil less seed starting mix in her library on March 3rd.  For a month they have been under grow lights for 18 hours, and then hardened off outside for a week or so.  This process strikes me as being somewhat of a miracle.  Not only because of what a tiny seed is capable of producing, but how Michele can probably grow plants in her sleep!  We also transplanted red leaf lettuce that has been planted last fall and had started growing in the garden in early spring.  Parent volunteers Teresa, Shira and Jeanette helped out with the planting. 

The kids also helped set up the sprinkler, mainly by forming a long 'hose train' to get the water hose to the garden.  Many also enjoyed getting wet.  Sprinkler's are still the cheapest way to entertain kids!

Garden Group Spring 2011

April 4, 2011
This year's Garden Group started with a HUGE boost!  Thanks to all the Heatherwood Garden supporters out there who participated in the Clorox Green Works Challenge and voted for a portion of the potential prize money to go to the garden, Amy Thompson, Organizer Extraordinare for this year's Walk and Roll, let us purchase a hoop house!   Our fearless leader, Michele Bailey has picked out a very nice barn-ish hoop house and has been working on getting it set up in the Garden.

Our first class started out with a Seed Swap.  Each child brought in plastic bags of 10-20 seeds with growing instructions.  They were then able to take as many new bags as they had brought to the swap.  Watermelon, sunflower, lettuce, tomatoes, cantelope, cucumber, cosmos, radishes, pumpkin, nasturtium....a wide array of seeds were quickly snatched up by eager hands.  Not only did kids take home new seeds to try out in their own garden, but they learned the value of trading.

After the swap, Theresa read the kids a wonderful book titled, 'The Curious Garden' by Peter Brown.  In the story, a boy named Liam decides to help a struggling garden.  Soon a smoggy, industrial city is converted into a lush, green world, one garden at a time. We hope that the kids in Heatherwood's garden group will learn the joy of gardening and take this 'seed' and grow gardens wherever they go in the future!

Before heading out to the garden, Michele went over tool rules.  "Tools are held with their sharp ends down.  And they aren't swords. They need to be handled with respect for everyone to be safe."

Out in the garden, with the help of parent volunteers Heather, Sandra and Theresa, paths in between the garden beds were made with straw.  The kids planted sugar snap peas that Michele had been soaking overnight in water.  Germination is often speeded up for certain plants if the seeds are soaked in water before planting. The fine print on the seed packages is worth reading!

Happy Gardening!

Daffodils in full bloom.  Photo: Shira Graff