Thursday, March 31, 2011

Garden Challenge


This is our first post in the Garden Challenge being hosted by The Homeschool Village.   Each month a new post will update the progress of our garden.  It's not too late to join the challenge if you're interested!

Here's our garden update:

So far we have cleared the brush and dried leaves that collected in the garden over the winter.

 
As you can see there is still alot of work to be done before we can plant anything.  We had a few days of nice weather but we are back to winter again here, so the garden will have to wait a few more weeks I think.

We also decided what we want to plant this year and worked out a plan of where to plant what. 

Ms. Q and Little M pouring over the Gurney's catalog

We are going to plant:
sweet peas
cantaloupe
pumpkins
watermelon
zucchini
lettuce
bush beans (like string beans only they grow on a bush instead of a vine)

We have a small strawberry patch we planted last year but we haven't uncovered it yet. (It's still too cold to remove the straw bedding covering the plants.)  Hopefully the plants survived the winter and we will have fresh strawberries this summer.  We are also going to try one of those upside down tomato growers, just for fun.

Ms. Q has already had a number of lesson on how plants grow, so this year she will be focusing on gardening skills.  We have planted a garden for a couple years but we always just plant the seeds and hope for the best.  This year we are going to learn more about gardening and will be reading some books to help our plants no only grow but thrive.  She is really excited about having more responsibility in the garden this year.  Previous years she has helped out but always felt that it was Mom's garden.  This year it's OUR garden. 

Here are the books Ms. Q will be using:

















Little M will be learning the basics about plants and what they need to grow.  He will be using Lesson Pathways Taking Care of Plants unit.  He is excited to go outside and play in the dirt.  He really likes to use the garden tools - he just rarely uses them for their intended purpose!

We will read these and some more fun children's books about plants together:




3 comments:

Cheryl Pitt said...

Our bed needs work too-those weeds can root antime anywhere LOL From the HSV Team, thanks for linking up! The next link up is April 28.

Zonnah said...

I love the picture of them looking at the seed catalog! Next year I am going to let my son pick out some vegetables to grow.

Unknown said...

I love the photo of them looking at the catalog too! Very cute! I just linked up to the Garden Challenge! We started our planning last month even though our raised veggie garden and strawberry bed are still under 2 feet of snow! We can't wait! Fresh beans and peas here we come...maybe in May! LOL

Jessy