Growing Our Garden

On Monday, after returning from our spring vacation, we were welcomed back to school with some beautiful blooms! After 6 long months, our tulips FINALLY blossomed, showing us their beautiful red blooms. They were joined by some daffodil friends, too!

  (click here to check out the Journey North Tulip Map!)

While we were excited to see our beautiful flowers out in the garden, we got to work planning and planting some "cool weather crops" in our raised garden beds. This year, we are trying out the Square Foot Gardening Method in our second grade bed! While we will all work together to plant beans and tomatoes on the ends of our beds, the middle of our bed was broken up into squares--while the size of our garden beds don't allow us to break our bed up into 3 rows of 8 9"x9" squares. Each second grade classroom has 6 of these squares to plant in, and students are working in small groups to grow one cool weather crop in their bed.  

On Tuesday, the giraffes and elephants got together in their small groups to decide on what to plant and plan out the way they would plant their seeds. Each group could choose from peas, swiss chard, beets, radishes, or spinach, and depending on which crop they chose, they drew a diagram of how they would need to plant their seeds on our Garden Blueprint

On Thursday morning, we headed outside after snack to plant our seeds just before the rain came! We each took turns planting our seeds in the soil, and we all got a chance to water our seeds after sowing them in the garden bed and we labeled each square with a paint stirrer 

When it wasn't our turn to grow, we spent our time exploring the other parts of the garden and reading books from our Little Free Library!

We even brought a little bit of our garden back to our classroom :)

We can't wait to watch our seeds grow over the next few weeks!

Inch by Inch, Row by Row

The giraffes have been showing off their green thumbs this week as our seeds and bulbs have begun to sprout in the classroom and out in our garden!

3/28/18

Many of our bean plants began to sprout out of the soil this week and they are growing FAST! Here are a few of our sprouts and the progress they've made in the last few days:

3/28/18

3/29/18

3/29/18

3/29/18

3.30/18

Jack will be getting to that castle in no time!

We've also been keeping beans in a cup with no soil so we could see what it looks like below the surface as the seed germinates! 

 We also ventured out to the garden this week to start checking for signs of our tulips that we planted back in October. While we could only see snow on Tuesday...

...we finally found some buds on Friday!!

We're tracking the growth of our tulips along with hundreds of other Citizen Scientists across the country for Journey North. When we were looking at the tracking map, we noticed that many of the tulips that were planted further south had already emerged several weeks ago and many of them have even started to bloom! We planted our bulbs on 10/27/17, so it took just over 5 months for them to emerge from the soil. 

Over the next few weeks, we will continue to observe our tulips and we will continue to watch the "spring thaw" on our map! You can check out this project as well as the many other projects Journey North is working on here!

Journey North: Planting The Seed

On Friday, we headed out to the garden to begin the first step in our "Journey North" project. Each fall, people across the Northern Hemisphere plant Red Emperor tulip bulbs in Journey North Test Gardens to help monitor seasonal change in a scientific way. In the spring, when the plants emerge and bloom, test gardeners report their data to the maps. One garden at a time, the relationship between climate, geography and the greening of spring is revealed. We are making our SMS Wolves Green Grower's Lab one of those test gardens by planing our own Red Emperor tulip bulbs around our garden beds. We reported our planting to Journey North so we can begin to track our growth. 

Once winter passes and spring begins, we will begin checking the garden for signs of growth where we planted our tulips. Once they begin to grow, we will report our findings to Journey North. We will also be able to see when other test gardeners begin to see their tulips sprouting! Local climate affects where, when, and how plants grow. Over time, the timing of plant growth can be used as an indicator of climate change. Everyone who participates in this international tulip test garden project contributes valuable information to a long-term database.

When we weren't planting, the giraffes made observations around our gardens and drew diagrams and wrote notes to keep in their science journals

We enjoyed our time out in the garden, and we can't wait to see our tulips bloom in the spring!