Ms. Palo's class visits the garden on 12/9

Today Ms. Palo's class visited the garden, a half of the class at a time so she could have some small group instruction time. We had two other adults each time which made for more personal attention during the kids' "work" time.

Today's lessons dealt with recycling, seed saving and root vegetables. In preparation for the discussion of composting we discussed what the kid's put in the black, blue and green bins at home. I mentioned that composting is a way of recycling. A few kids do that at home. Simply put, composting is combining greens (fruit and veggie waste, fresh plant waste from the garden), egg shells and coffee grinds with browns (products from trees e.g. dried leaves, twigs). This mixture should be kept as moist as a damp sponge and after a few months of turning to aerate, the result will be compost which is a soil amendment that we'll add to the garden.

The kids saved seeds from basil, lavender and cilantro that we'll plant in the spring. Some kids volunteered that it's cheaper to save seeds then you don't need to buy them!

Drawing root vegetables

Mixing the compost after adding tomato plants.

We discussed carrots, beets and radishes-all of which are root vegetables. They discussed the different size and colors of beets and radishes. They should be able to identify beets by the veins in the leaves.

Later we'll eat beet and arugula salad. Today the kids sampled arugula and mint.

Thanks to today's helpers: Peg and Carolyn.