So the 2018 Spring Horticulture class has begun and we have 18 enthusiastic students learning all about gardening - what a great way to spend the last 6 weeks of school!
There is so much going on and the students have been super busy with all sorts of things. Some highlights are:
We have a wonderful courtyard in the center of our school and the students have been hard at work cleaning the area and rejuvenating the gardens there for our graduation ceremony. We are also hopeful that if we make the courtyard more inviting, more students will also want to hang out there on a daily basis.
Cleaning up our Indigenous Healing Garden (weeding and re-planting each of the four sacred medicines).
Building new garden beds! Students have assembled and filled three brand new garden beds and have begun planting in them too! One of them will be our perennial asparagus bed (we're hopeful we can be harvesting crisp asparagus spears from this bed in the next couple of years and that we'll be able to harvest for the next 20 years)!
We have a bunch of flowers blossoming and it is such a beautiful thing! Geraniums, Hibiscus and Marigold flowers have filled the classroom and greenhouse with colour and happiness.
Students have worked extremely hard at gridding out our gardens into square feet. We now have over 350 square feet of raised garden beds to grow delicious produce for our fellow NJ students and community!
We are so lucky to have already had a great harvest of radishes and we are looking forward to raspberries and peas too! The addition of our new 8' x 12' greenhouse has really helped us to start harvesting earlier than usual. Students have sowed multiple batches of delicious radishes and our first harvest was bountiful. Students were so excited to snack on these fresh radishes in class and to take some home to their families.
On Friday, we received our special delivery of new classmates! These are 30-35 butterfly larvae (caterpillars) and yes, each of them have been named! Students worked diligently at mixing their food and preparing the new larva homes. We are so excited to watch these little guys grow! Eventually each one will form a chrysalis and we can't wait to watch them emerge as beautiful painted lady butterflies!
These are just some of the things going on in the gardening class! We can't wait to update you again soon.
Thanks for reading, happy gardening!
