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!
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| Daffodils in full bloom. Photo: Shira Graff |
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