We took all our corn, tomato, cucumber and sunflower seedlings to the Palliser Height plot at the Yara Community Gardens. We spent the afternoon, planting, doing a scavenger hunt, and journaling. By the end of the afternoon, the entire garden was planted!

 

We spent the morning sorting through a year’s worth of vermicomposting. We pulled out the remaining worms and collected 3 buckets of nutritious compost for our plants!

We had a phenomenal first field trip of the year.  We started out at the Moose Jaw landfill where we learned that Moose Jaw produces 300 tonnes of garbage every day!  We found out that in 2017, our current landfill will be full and will need to be expanded.  It is estimated that 100 tonnes of recyclable and compostable material is added to the landfill every week.

From there we went to our Community Garden plot.  The amazing people at the community garden gave us a tour, got us to harvest carrots from the community plot and helped us harvest pumpkins from our plot.  We also harvested a sunflower and cleaned up the tomato and herb plants.

Then we went to the Free to be Me Animal Sanctuary where we dropped off corn stalks from the garden to feed the animals.  This was one example of waste diversion.  Instead of taking the dead corn stalks to the landfill, we gave them to the animals!

After a week away in Vancouver, the garden is looking FABULOUS!  Thanks to all the parents and staff who helped out!  Also, our cloche seems to have worked as our newest pumpkin seedlings are doing well.  I took the cover off today and that may have been a mistake as the winds tonight have been fierce!  I also added the worm castings (compost) from one of our worm bins to the pumpkins.

Castings  ( in big silver bowl) & pumpkin seedlings

 

We’ve had great luck growing our own seedlings in our classroom garden with our fabulous 600W light and huge windows.  However, we have NOT had much success transplanting the seedlings.  Our plan is to have pumpkins to harvest in the fall.  Unfortunately, so far every pumpkin seedling transplant has died!   Luckily the 3 directly-sown seeds are doing well.  Hardening off didn’t seem to help the last seedling.  So today I bought and installed a row cover over our last 4 pumpkin seedling transplants.  Here’s to hoping!  (Incidentally, the root of the problem may be that I didn’t put a fan on the seedlings earlier enough.  Next time!)

We now have a herb section in our garden!