Spring Sprung

Well Spring has Sprung. I know I think fast but its here right? Daffodils around town are telling me that it is time to start planting. Cherry blossoms scent the air and bike rides offer thrilling smells, stunning colors, and views of people with big smiles. Spring temps are rising and the soil temps with them. I have been touring around Oregon taking soil temperatures and have found them to vary greatly from location to location. The average afternoon temperature that I have calculated around noon is about 50 degrees F. Not bad...and if I were in the business of making money from growing food I would be putting my seeds in ASAP hoping to get a head start on my local farmers. Since I am in the business of garden education and farm to school programming, I am waiting for another week before planting. I use my little home garden as a test plot for germ rates. It doesn't get a lot of hot full sun until summer so it stays a bit cooler during the day. I have noticed my first pea sprout, some poppies about 2 inches tall, and big columbines from last year growing up strong. I spent some time at the centers doing some curriculum development. In the posts that follow, you can find a whole lot of whats going on in our centers. I will be posting the curriculum that I am doing at the gardens each week. You can upload the curriculum** from my site and use it with your own projects. The curriculum is already free and on the internet. We will be using the children's experiences with the garden and the curriculum on the web as a way to connect you to our centers and our centers to each other. The curriculum below is about defining living/non-living things. I am not following the rock boiling thing at all...just talking with the kids about safe ways of observing things while in my class. We will be making some special goggles for them out of toilet paper rolls and they will be able to observe living and non living things in the classrroom and outdoors. This will be a good time to get the rules of garden education across to the children. I have also printed out tons of pictures of living and non living things. We will use the pictures during the first part of class each week until we get them down. If you need further info write me a question here or email me at ocdcgardens@gmail.com. I also included a pic of the mushrooms growing in our gardens. Mushrooms are a GREAT sign of fertility and health in a garden. I believe that these are either LBM's or maybe inky caps. Not sure but they look great. The last pic is of our pea trellis. Check back for some more photos and updates next week. We will be planting peas, radish, spinach, salad, beets, and greens next week. (**curriculum sourced from cfaitc.org)