Our 8th Year of Gardening at the Mine.

It's time to get the gardens started.

You're Invited

Who: MMES Families, scouts, community volunteers - no experience needed.

What: Garden Workday

When: October 23rd
Time: 8am-11
Bring: Smiles, Gloves, Water.

Join us to help turn the soil and get the classroom veggie & flower gardens ready for fall seed planting. Supplies and snacks provided. Got a favorite garden tool? Bring it.

Garden review

It is heating up and our gardens are put to bed waiting for next year to sprout and bloom. Thank you to everyone who came out the help pull and cover the gardens. A special thanks to Mr. Cruse, and Mrs. Engstler for helping with this job more than once. It certainly isn't the funnest part of gardening. Here are a few pictures from this year and years past:

No child left inside-Try grant writing

"Today's children spend more time in the virtual world than the natural world. How can we expect the next generation to care for the environment if they feel disconnected from it and lack understanding about the impact of their actions on our health and food supply, both locally and globally? One solution: Get them in the garden!" - Subaru Healthy Sprouts Award.

Check here and here for two good site for grants and gardening topics.
See this link for a breakdown of recent grant activity. Interested in writing a grant for MMES? Contact Karie.

Can you find me?

With all the rain, our gardens are living large. We have a record breaking sunflower stalk this year! Come see what is growing. Click to enlarge the Find Me pages for each of our (3) gardens. Hurry the blooms won't last long. We will close the gardens for the summer in mid-late April. Thanks.

Happy Thnanksgiving

The Iroquois believe corn, beans and squash are precious gifts from the Great Spirit, each watched over by one of three sisters spirits, called the De-o-ha-ko, or “Our Sustainers". The planting season is marked by ceremonies to honor them, and a festival commemorates the first harvest of “green” corn on the cob. By retelling the stories and performing annual rituals, Native Americans passed down the knowledge of growing, using and preserving the Three Sisters through generations. This crop knowledge and growing tradition, helped the Pilgrims survive their first very cold winter.
Credits: web site, web link

A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness.

After a few short weeks we already see plants like squash, corn, beans, and radish popping up from the soil. (Radishes are the reliable, and fast sprouters). All this planting took time and volunteers. Thank you to all the classroom volunteers who came out to help. Karie and I really appreciate the parent and teacher support. Believe it or not we planted with every student grades preK-5th grade. The current 5 grade class holds the record for most consecutive years gardening at the Mine. Fantastic.

Kindergarteners plant their ABC garden from A to Z.

B is for Broccoli. Kindergardeners compare seeds from different plants.Some seeds are bumpy, some are smooth. We saw seeds that were dark and light brown.

Multiage plant seeds and messages.

Multiage plants seeds, wonders what part of a plant they eat, and then plant their Red Ribbon Week messages about making good choices all year long.

1st and 2nd graders plant border flowers and veggies.

First and second graders compare seeds, and talk about root vegetables, and learn that when they eat a pea - they are eating a seed. Neat!

3rd grade plants veggies like radishes, and flowers.

Third graders compare seeds and check the seed packets for useful growing information. Some classes write observations in their garden journals when they returned to class.

4th graders plant three sister gardens.

Fourth graders listen to the story of the 3 sisters. Corn (center ring) Bean (middle ring) and Squash (the outer ring). They read important graphed information on the on the back of their seed packets.

5th graders plant low water plants and wildflowers in courtyard.

With jobs like raising the lowering the flag, caring for the solar fountain in the courtyard, looking after red wigglers, and keeping an eye on the golden and red poppy seeds. The fifth graders are a busy bunch.

Pumpkin Seeds Are Good For You - Roast Some Today.

Click to enlarge then hit back button.

Micro means Small

Grow your own Micro Greens -
You might know words like microscope and micro organism (a living thing too small to see with our naked eyes). Well the prefix, micro is Greek in origin and means, small.

I'm here to tell you about Micro Greens. Micro greens are baby plants just a little older than a sprout. You can grow a tray of these guys in a small (or micro) space in your house, like a window sill or on your patio. Get a few packs of seeds and a take out tray from a restaurant or produce container and you are in business.

Or course your mini garden will need all the regular stuff like, soil, water, sunlight. I put a layer of paper towels over my seeds to keep them clean and moist, then pop on the lid and watch until they sprout. After that, remove the paper towel and wait until your plants are about 2-3 inches high. Then start munching!

These little plants are great because they pack more nutrition than mature plants. Radishes and turnip greens grow the fastest and have a little crunchy spice. Give it a try.

What kind of nutrition can you buy for a dollar?

Nationally, the average amount of money spent on food (after overhead) to provide children a school lunch is about a dollar. Join the Time for Lunch nutrition campaign. It's about creating better nutritional guidelines and choices for kids.

The National School Lunch Program provides a meal to more than 30 million children every school day. By giving schools the resources to serve real food, 30 million children can have healthier options.

By providing children with locally grown fruits and vegetables, we can support local farmers and create green jobs in our communities. By purchasing local food, we can stop wasting oil needed to transport food and reduce the impact on our environment. By raising children who enjoy real food, we can start laying the foundation for America’s future prosperity.

The Time for Lunch Campaign is a project of Slow Food USA, an educational non-profit with the goal of creating a world in which everyone can enjoy food that is good, clean and fair. Read more about the Time For Lunch campaign here. Get involved, write your national legislator to let him or her know that real food is a priority in to you and your school. To find the office's address, go to http://congress.org and type in your zip code.

Start Up

Let's get growing!
We are getting ready to start fall planting. Each year students and MMES volunteers clean, plant seeds, observe, enjoy, seed harvest, then cover the gardens for the next year. Many of the plants that grow are annuals. That means the seeds don't typically re-seed themselves after one growing season. Sometimes we get surprises that come up the from previous year. This year we are planning on planting vegetable and flower seeds. Come help and enjoy watching the gardens and students grow. (photo from 2008 work day.)

Our 7th year of gardening at the Mine!

Fall Gardening
We will be ready to garden when the weather cools a bit. Mid October is my guess. We will post the work date in the MMES web newsletter when we have it. We hope everyone will help us to get the soil ready for another year of gardening!

A few new things we want to try this year are growing mirco-greens, doing a little worm composting, and perhaps a little reward gardening with the character counts program. Stay tuned. More info to follow in the next few posts. Welcome back gardeners!

Our Young Gardeners Like Their Vegetables

Here are the results of Mrs. Reed's Veggie Poll. All these vegetables are growing in our gardens. Looks like a tie between, broccoli, carrots, and lettuce. Way to go! Be looking for the carrots to peek out of the soil. They should be ready soon. Our blogspot poll had broccoli as the winner.

Need Something to Graph?

Check out the poll on this page. Get your friends to vote for their favorite veggie. Come back on March 10th for the results. Make a graph of the results. What kind of graph would best represent the information of the poll? Line, Bar, or Pie graph - You decide.
Remember to eat your veggies!

Click here to see a website to help you make your graph:

Find Your Favorite Marketplace

Thank you to those families who helped donate to our Annual Farmer's Market at the end of January. We raised $80.00 to split between the Local Food Bank and MMES garden program!! Thank you for your support. We were fortunate to have 5 classes help us harvest our produce to sell in the courtyard. Great job gardeners!

Have you ever been to a Farmer's Market in town?
Check these links for places to visit:
Try the light rail to get to this market:
http://www.foodconnect.org/phoenixmarket/
This one is close:
http://www.arizonafarmersmarkets.com/pageRoadrunner/roadrunner.htm
Buying locally grown produce helps our community.

What Are They Eating At Our Nation's Captiol?

We have a new President.
On Jan 20, 2009 our 44th President, Barack Obama, was sworn in. After the ceremony invited guests had lunch together. Because President Obama, and our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln, were Senators from the same state, (Illinois) the lunch had a theme - a tribute to history and Abe Lincoln. The recipes for the lunch were reported to be some of Mr. Lincoln's favorite foods. Abe liked winter veggies like potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, onions, and beans.

Our school gardens have some of those same kinds of veggies growing in them right now!

***Look for lettuce, spinach, peas, swiss chard, and squash at the
5th Annual MMES Farmer's Market Jan 28, 2009 (3-6pm) & 29th (1-3pm) in the school courtyard. Donations benefit the local food bank and MMES garden program.

1. Can you think of 3 things Abraham Lincoln and President Obama have in common?
2. What are 3 differences between Mr. Lincoln and President Obama?

3. What is the capitol of Illinois?

Search the Internet with your family to find recipes and perhaps even a cooking video of food served at the recent luncheon. (Great inspiration for our MMES 5th grade chefs.)

A Simple Way to Taste What's Going On.

Welcome back gardeners. Happy 2009. We get requests for this recipe every year. Many classrooms snacked on this before winter break. Remember the best way to feed your brain is by eating fresh natural foods.

Click recipe card for larger view.

What's growing?

Have you seen this?

Hint: You can see this vine with purple flowers climbing near a yellow shrub and close to painted gourd birdhouses.

When Spanish explorers first encountered the Indians of Peru and Brazil, they found this plant used in native folk medicine as a sedative. They took it back to Spain, and then it gradually spread throughout Europe.

There are more than 400 varieties of this plant throughout the world today. Common names are: Maypop herb, Apricot vine, and Passion Vine.

http://www.springboard4health.com/notebook/herbs_passion_flower.html

Red Ribbon Week Red Poppies

The most delightful thing about a garden is the anticipation it provides.
- W.E. Johns

Students planted Red Poppy seeds during Red Ribbon Week. We won't see them bloom until the spring. Watching and waiting will help to remind us to make good choices all year long.

Did you know that in just one pod there are thousands of seeds smaller than a grain of sand? Students planted the Poppy seeds we collected from last year in the gardens this year.

It begins with a seed...

Fall Planting

We have three triangle and one rectangle shaped gardens. Students plant their seeds in the fall. We talk about the size, shape, color of the seeds, what type of plant will grow, and how long the seed will take to germinate or sprout. We are lucky to have (2) planting seasons. Gardeners in states with colder climates are cleaning and covering their gardens for the cold winter.

We know radishes are the first to peek out of the soil. We planted in October and we already have a few small radishes to harvest!