McKinley Garden Club

In case you hadn't heard, we have a garden club at McKinley. We meet after school on Mondays and do some garden clean up, projects and have fun in the dirt. Last Monday was our first meeting and we found LOTS of worms. Do you know what that means? We've got some good tasting dirt! 

So one of our first projects was to get the pumpkin patch ready for the kindergardeners. Right now, it's a weedy mess. So we are experimenting with "solarizing." As you can see below, we put down a big sheet of plastic and are trying to cook those nasty weeds so we can make room for The Three Sisters--pumpkins, beans and squash. Stay tuned to see how this experiment goes!

These boys are flattening out the weeds. There was a lot of stomping, coordination, and cooperative board-rolling. 

Now for the plastic! UP it goes, and then down.

We also had some really serious gardeners tackling the weeds in some of the beds. They learned the difference between a tiny little cosmos flower and wild carrot--which is a very frilly, fuzzy weed. This bed will be ready for the 2nd graders to plant soon.

Great green garlic growing

Remember the last post in January? I know, that was a while ago...
Boy, garlic and bears aren't the only ones that have been hibernating! The garlic was just starting to pop it's pointy sprouts out. Well look at the progress:

The one above is from early March. The one below is from Tax Day, last Monday. That looks like some happy garlic.