Garden Beginnings
Welcome, spring! We are so excited for springtime here at The Olive Branch. With a magical space like ours, springtime brings abundance and beauty. Our garden area has been waiting all year for a big overhaul, and we feel that the time has finally come. We are so excited for the children to work in the garden together and to feel a sense of ownership and pride over the space. We began by seeding some ideas (see what I did there?): What should we grow in our garden? We made a list together and hung it up in the classroom for reflection and motivation.
First step: a fence
We know that our chickens are hungry little monsters and will eat any yummy plants they can get their beaks on. If our garden wants a chance at survival in a yard with free-range chickens, we’ve got to think of a way to keep them out.
With some help from the children, Sean built a frame for our fence, and slowly but surely, we’ve been painting pickets and attaching them. We don’t know when the whole thing will be finished, but when it is, it sure will be beautiful.
Prepping for planting
To get our soil ready for our crop, we started by pulling grass and weeds. A couple of children donned gloves and started filling baskets with all of the “unwanted” growth. Although we don’t want them growing in our garden, these weeds can be quite beautiful and green, so we of course repurposed them. We filled our sensory table with grass and scissors, and practiced our fine motor skills to cut and paste onto a beautiful garden collage.
Next, we got some big bags of soil and tore them open and spread them all across the garden. This is special sensory work, and we took the time to feel and smell the soil, and use our big muscles and rakes to spread it as far as we could. Each time we were ready for a new bag, Dominic was quite proud to show off his strength and carry one all the way up the stairs and into the garden by himself. Wow!!
With soft dirt on the ground, it was time to start designating our pathway. We need a way to pass through the garden and care for our plants without stepping on any! We gathered some stepping stones, and Berkeley and Dominic worked together to make one of their own! We have some more materials, so we’ll definitely be making more stepping stones as this project continues.
Our garden is almost ready for plants, so we need to take some time to germinate some seeds! Many of the children had the opportunity to work with Sean in planting seeds in starter trays. We’ll observe them, and when the seedlings are big enough, we’ll plant them in the ground!
See the photo story of prepping for plants below:
Our plants are almost ready
With our soil prepped and our seedlings beginning to grow, our garden is almost ready to fill! In addition to our seeds, we got some starter plants and some flowers and we started to plan. Dominic has really been taking a leadership role alongside Sean in our garden work, and together they designed some planter boxes with flowers and herbs and got to planting.
With our starter crop, we began to space them around the garden and make some plans for where we want to plant them after giving them a little bit of time to acclimate to their new home. Elliot took some initiative one morning when he learned that kind words help plants grow and feel welcome, and he moved carefully throughout our garden whispering kind sentiments to them like, “I hope you are strong and grow really big and grow food for us to eat.”
After leaving our starter plants to acclimate unsupervised, however, we experienced a slight disaster: when we checked on our plants, the pesky birds had picked them clean!!! Check out the photo story below to see us prepping our plants, and stay tuned to see what we did next to protect them from the birds!
