In the Potting shed

In the Potting Shed

Who doesn't have a bolt hole, a sanctuary, a place of peace and quiet? Well the Potting Shed is every gardeners dream. Under the guise of tool storage and a place to 'pot up' plants, it is a place where plans are made, dreams are lived out and newspapers are read! Created with bric a brac, these 'rooms' are true temples to recycling, creativity and utilitarian needs. Shelves are created out of pallets, poles out of plumbing pipes, chairs out of boxes and ... they don't need dusting!

April 29, 2014 Too wet to go outside on club day this week, so we busied ourselves making signs for our compost piles. Sunny also gave Tommy a lesson in writing chinese.

April 22, 2014 an afternoon in the garden transplanting sunflower seeds, potting on arugula and taking it easy.

April 8, 2014 Thinning the carrots, washing them and eating them - what could be fresher and more delicious

The Spring 2014 Garden club has begun.

March 18, 2014 2 days before the official start of spring, but it doesn't deter us.
With a pared down group we filled many seed trays with seeds of different sizes and filled our green house shelves. Bring it on!

It's here! Fall Garden club 2013

Boo!

October 29, 2013
It's that Pumpkin time of year again and the garden club continued exploring the cucurbitaceae family of plants. Gourds, luffa, squash, cucumber, melons and pumpkins are all related. Who'd have guessed? With a closer look you probably would have. They all grow on vines, with similar looking leaves, and they all produce big fleshy often, (not always) yummy fruits.
So on tuesday the club attacked and carved 3 pumpkins, we saved the seeds. While we created our daytime halloween pumpkins we munched on roasted pumpkins seeds and roasted pumpkins doused in maple syrup in the oven. A warm conclusion to our harvest festival!

October 22, 2013.
The Fall Garden Club has begun and here are our next generation of "Green Thumbs". Last week they harvested and made Louffah and this week they seeded a bed with Austrian Winter Pea cover crops and transplanted our banana plant and lemon grass into the protection of the greenhouse. We also lifted and filled our thyme seat with more soil.

Thyme - getting a lift

Club Activities

Through the fall and the spring, the garden club runs . We like to do activities that go beyond weeding and watering; doing a variety of things based in and around the garden. This includes arts and crafts, cooking and of course gardening - here are but a few we may get up to - depending upon the weather and the season.

·      Make a gardening apron: Decorate our gardener's smock.
·      Keep a gardening journal: Make and keep up a gardening journal, update the Venables vegatables web page.
·      The Greenhouse: Learning about how a greenhouse works, what it does and how Venables relates to the (other) 3 Rs: Reducing Reusing and Recycling
·      Painting alfresco: Painting a picture outside in the garden.
·      Composting: How our compost bins work, the wormery and the connection between our food scraps and a healthy soil
· Plant an Apple Tree: Planting and training an apple tree onto our trellis.
·      Preparation for the Spring fair: Paint plant pots, and transplant seedlings - collect our all important tin cans!
·      Sowing and Seeding: Planting peas, garlic and beans, plants and seeds - and all things green, learning about spacing and seasons.
· New Plants: Taking and growing cuttings, collecting seeds.
· Math in the Garden: A mathematical treasure hunt.
·      Cooking: Stone Soup, squash, apple crisp.
· Planing the Spring beds: Learn about crop rotation and vegetable families; and companion plants
·      Making a bird’s nest: from the Birds nest gourds we grew.
·      Making a Loufah: from the Loufahs we grew.
·      Hey Presto Pesto: Create basil pesto to bring home.
·      Visit a bakery: We hope to organize a visit to a local bakery so the children can at first hand play with dough, see the basic ingredients of bread, how it's made, and taste the finished product.
·      Harvesting: Taking home and tasting what we grow, to share at home.

Spring Garden Club 2013

Gourds

March 12, 2013
Just days after 2 snow days - and days without power (for some of us) we had glorious sunshine in the garden. We spent our time scrapping and drilling; painting and varnishing our bird's nest gourds.

Ms. Martin keeping up with the spring planting schedule!

Great Harvest Bread Company

March 5, 2013
Matt Monson, the owner of the Great Harvest Bread company generously opened his doors (he's usually at his bakery at 3:00 in the morning, so we were very lucky to catch him at 3:00 in the afternoon with his eyes open), to our Gardening Club to show us first hand how bread is made. From wheat seeds no less - just like what we put in our garden! He puts it into the stone mill and out comes flour. There are 5 basic ingredients in a loaf of bread: flour, water, yeast, salt and honey (in honey whole wheat that is). The children were allowed to push and shove, bang and prod .... lumps of dough. Then roll it in as many "yummies" as it could possibly accommodate - sunflower seeds, cinnamon chips, and/or raisins! While the buns baked Matt showed us around his bakery. We left with full tummies and a loaf of bread to share at home. A really lovely visit - Thank you Matt.

from grain

to flour

the BIG oven

the dough hook

Gardening Journals

February 26, 2013

Jennifer Esser ran us through the process of personalizing our journals. Cover a plain book with sheets of newsprint or phone book pages. Draw on your picture with pastels and pencils or markers. Paint over the whole surface with modpodge and let it dry overnight.

Valentine Prep

February 12, 2013

Heart Shaped Bird Feeders
Ingredients:
3/4 cup flour
1/2 cup water
1 pkt unflavored gelatine
3 tble sp sugar water
4 cups bird seed
Method
Mix all the 'other' ingredients then add to the birdseed in a big bowl to make a big gooey mix.
Spoon out amounts into heart shaped (or any other) cookie cutter molds
on a baking tray. Press in firmly. Work a small hole near top of shape with pencil or straw. Gently pull away shape - This is a tricky part as seeds are not set yet and can fall apart. If you can, greece inside of shape. Leave to set for 8 hours or more. Thread hole with string and hang out for the birds.

Don't despair, they look a little disheveled until they dry.

Are you someone's Valentine?

Yogurt pots to ........ Thank you to the kind, healthy, yogurt eater who (prefers strawberries) donated all their pots.

(Don't forget to drill drainage holes in the bases).

.........Lavender pots

Preparations for our Spring Fair. We transplanted our Lavender seedlings into larger pots, to give them some more room to grow with some added soil.

Gardening shirts

February 5, 2013
If you are going to get dirty - you might as do it in a one-of-a-kind designer shirt!

Design your shirt, by practicing on a piece of paper. Redraw your design on your T- shirt with a sharpie. Color it in with fabric pastels (Fabric Fun Pastel Dye Sticks by Pental -$5.000 for 15). Fix the pastel by ironing over the design with a hot iron over a piece of paper.

Then you have to do a line-up!

Mary Mary quite contrary. How does your garden grow?

January 29, 2013
The one sunny, warm day of the week! Great we could hold our first club day outside, and introduce the new club members to the garden. We planted some seeds in trays to grow on and sell at our spring fair. Then we decorated our garden with silver bells and cockle shells, blowing away some of the winter cobwebs - just until the flowers come up.

With silver bells

And cockle shells

And pretty maids all in a row.

Fall Garden Club: 2012

Planning Our Spring Garden

We started off the club listing our favorite vegetables -
Then we discussed that vegetables are plants, and as such are made up of different parts: Roots, leaves, flowers, fruit and seeds. As vegetables we only are usually interested in one particular part of the plant. We use this fact as a simple way to categorize the vegetables: ROOTS - LEAVES - FRUIT.
This is how Thomas Jefferson categorized his vegetable garden at Montecello - Ask the 3rd Graders!
We looked at how these categories were distributed in the plant beds last spring. Then we made sure next spring a different category will be in the bed. This is crop rotation. It is done on a 3 year cycle, and done so pests that like a specific type of vegetable can not thrive in the soil and have a good feast year after year.
Beneficial plants and flowers are those plants that attract bugs that either feast on some of the unwanted bugs or help pollinate the flowers to make fruit. A lot of herbs are beneficial plants as are the marigolds we saw last year. Some beneficial plants even deter some of the unwanted bugs.
For more discussion about crop rotation and lists of beneficial plants see the schedule page.

our 'ideal' vegetable

dividing pictures of vegetables into categories

collaging the vegetable types onto the vegetable bed

OUR SPRING 2013 BED PLAN:

WOOD BED

BLUE BED

IN-GROUND BED

RED BED

YELLOW BED

OUR SPRING 2013 VEGETABLE LIST (SO FAR)
ROOTS: Potatoes, carrots, garlic, onions, beet, radish
LEAVES: Kale, brussel sprouts, broccoli, lettuce, chard, spinach,
FRUIT: Tomatoes, corn, cucumber, melons, squash, jalapeno peppers,

To see how our endeavors made it into the spring 2013 planting plan see the plans page.

A Measuring Treasure Hunt

December 4, 2012
The idea of Math in the Garden didn't go down as joyously as did the Painting in the Garden. But a few minutes later, armed with tape measures, rulers and measuring things as small as bugs and as long as walks, we all realized Math is FUN. Especially when rounded off with a lovely bite of warm apple crisp made with 6 apples!

Math in the Garden

To see the measuring treasure hunt go to the resources page

Planting Garlic and other necessary things

November 27, 2012

Planting Garlic

But take a picture of the roly-poly bug first.

Planting Kale

And Ginger and Sun Chokes

Warming up at the end of the day with roasted pumpkin and pumpkin seeds.

recipe

Worms worms worms worms .......

November 13, 2012

If you thought your children were squeamish think again. After an hour with Donna Morris the children had measured them, spied on them, written about them, played with them, put them to bed, and eventually ate them. Okay, So we don't get any letters of complaint here, full disclaimer they ate gummie worms! But all other activites were with real live, wiggling, looooong ( the longest was 9") and cold earthworms and red wigglers. And the children loved it.

Introducing the worm bin componants

The "worm tea" catchment area

Making bedding

Creating the bed

Adding food

Adding more food

Adding worms

Adding more worms

By the end of the hour, the children had learnt all about worms: What they look like up close, feel like, what they like to eat, different types, and how they move - Ms Morris gave a beautiful demonstration along the floor of the gym, followed by 14 children. Most importantly they learnt how they eat up our vegetative food waste and make beautiful healthy compost for our garden. They put together a wormery - and set up bins to collect our uneaten apple cores.