Are you planning a garden? Have you already started? Will you be incorporating your gardening adventures into your homeschooling? Join along with other homeschool families through the Homeschool Village’s Garden Challenge. The challenge starts today! Add a link to your garden posts each month and you could win. All of the details are in this post at HSV.
Here is one of our little blocks for our take on square foot gardening. We are still planning. Mostly, we will plant whatever looks good and is available when we go to the almost local nursery. The nursery we go to is family owned and about 45 minutes away. I could go to a bigger store, closer but I like supporting smaller family owned businesses. I like knowing that they started tomato seeds back in February when it was snowy and cold and I was dreaming of fresh, ripe Indiana tomatoes. Besides tomatoes, I know we will be growing sunflowers. I am contemplating giving a whole garden block to the sunflowers–just the perimeter–to make a cool house. The basic instructions can be found here. I love the pictures and additional tips included on this page. We will be participating in The Great Sunflower Project. From their site “…In 2008, we started this project as a way to gather information about our urban, suburban and rural bee populations. We wanted to enlist people all over the US and Canada to observe their bees and be citizen scientists.” They have more information on their site, including resources for teachers and a coupon code to order Lemon Queen seeds from Renee’s Garden.
That is just some of what we will be doing in the garden. I plan on using Jolanthe’s Preschool Pack, as well as Amanda Bennett’s Gardens unit study. This will be our first year of gardening without my husband’s grandfather’s advice. He was in his mid-90s when he passed away last fall. He still put out a garden last year-amazing! He was always sharing from it–both the abundance and his words of wisdom.
Even if you don’t blog you can take part in the challenge. Even if you don’t have a large garden, you can grow something–a tomato plant in a pot on your porch, a little pot of basil on your windowsill. I tend to grow things I can eat 😀 but you can grow flowers just for their beauty.