Sunflowers and berries, and potatoes, oh my!

Children's Universe is a daycare down the street from our school and today we had a fun event with them in the garden! First, our NJ students started by reading books to the daycare children in our student lounge and then we set off for an adventure outside.  The NJ gardeners had started sunflowers (NJ's official flower) in our "greenhouses" in the classroom and today we transplanted those sunflowers outside with the help of the daycare children! Each NJ student got in a group with two daycare children and together planted 10 sunflowers down the fence.

One of our transplanted sunflowers from
the NJ greenhouse to the NJ garden! Hoping
the daycare children will enjoy coming over
to water their flowers and watch them grow
over the summer!

We haven't had a chance to make a "sunflower bed" yet so one
of the NJ students had a great idea to mark off the newly
transplanted sunflowers with some trail tape to ensure
the sunflowers weren't chopped up by the lawnmowers!

Our strawberry patch is coming along nicely as well! We've decided to remove the netting for now to ensure that the strawberries can be pollinated but we'll put the netting back once the berries are out!

Our ever-growing strawberry bed! We're so excited about
all the flowers. Flowers = strawberries!

Aren't the strawberry flowers
beautiful?!

We found these fancy potato bags at Ritchies Feed and Seed and decided to try them out in the class! We know you can grow potatoes pretty much anywhere but we were curious to try these ones with the harvesting flap at the bottom. Essentially, we rolled down the bag and covered the bottom with some potting soil and vermicompost.  We then planted seed potatoes in the bottom of the bag and covered them with more soil.  Once the green stem comes out of the soil with some leaves we'll unroll the bag and keep adding soil (bit by bit) until the bag is full of soil (and hopefully yummy potatoes)! We'll keep you posted on how it goes!

Fancy potato planter!

The first layer of potatoes have
already started growing! These are
the Norland 'early' variety
seed potatoes from Ritchies

 Thanks for reading! Happy Gardening!