Garden Journal : June 13, 2018

At Arlington Hills Open Door school, we have 8 garden plots. Teacher Paul’s class has 4 of those plots.

This spring, we planted cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, green beans, and onions in our garden.

In plot 1, we have cucumbers and peppers.

We planted the cucumber plants from seeds, and the plants have already come up:

We did not plant pepper seeds, but pepper plants that were first grown indoors.

All the plants are a little taller this week.

There are a few weeds.

 

 

In plot 2, we have tomato plants:

     

The tomato plants grew a little bit more since last time, and there are some weeds.

 

 

In plot 3 we planted onions and cucumbers.

The onions came up and grew a lot:

We could harvest them now, but we are going to wait a little longer. The cucumber seeds we planted also came up. There are some weeds.

 

In plot 4 we have green beans. The plants grew, but many of the leaves are gone. Maybe a rabbit ate the leaves, and maybe an insect such as a beetle at the leaves. We are going to find out now.

 

We found a hole in the fence! An animal chewed this hole to get into the garden. The new maintenance man, John, told us that every morning he sees two rabbits inside the garden.

 

 

 

We do not need to work in the garden today, but we are going to water the garden with the sprinkler.

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Harvest in the Spring

Our students spend time harvesting mint and chives while cleaning out the herb garden here at the Open Door Learning Center!

Getting Ready for the Spring

4 inches of snow on the ground today but we’re already thinking about the garden! Check out our new blog for 2015 at https://opendoorgarden.wordpress.com/

(but feel free to scroll down here through our photos and stories from 2014’s garden!)

Garden Take Down

As the autumn leaves begin to descend, the students at Open Door have begun to tear down the garden. Although we were sad to pull out the plants and roll up the fencing, we feel lucky to have been part of something so beautiful this year! We are already looking forward to starting anew next spring. This blog will go into hibernation for the winter but stay tuned for new updates as soon as the snow melts. Thank you for following our garden blog and we will see you in 2015!

 

 

School Harvest Party

Arlington Hills closed up its garden season with a harvest party.  Students from our advanced ESL class, wrote recipes, planned and organized cooking teams, and cooked a meal for around 100 people! Other classes assisted with vegetable harvest, banquette set-up, and clean-up.  Our preschool children sang an apple song and the school participated in Bingo fun!  Dishes from around the world were sampled and enjoyed.  To date, our school garden has yielded over 580 pounds of produce!  That is the equivalent of 2 black bears, one female zebra, almost 4 deer, 116 chickens, 240 squirrels, or 4,384 eggs!

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Harvest Season

Proof of our hard work in the garden this summer came in the form of 570 lbs of produce (and counting)! Now all that’s left to do is to reap the benefits and prepare for our Harvest Party this Thursday. Stay tuned for photos of the good food and company that are to come!

“To dream a garden and then to plant it is an act of independence and even defiance to the greater world.” – Stanley Crawford

Broccoli

Zebra Stripe Tomatoes

Brussel Sprouts

Peppers

Okra

Eura came back to Open Door today and was so happy to see how big all the plants have grown! She was amazed by how tall the okra became and how beautiful the flowers looked. Great job to all the teachers and students who have helped to create such a lovely and fruitful garden!

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” – Cicero

Garden and library make perfect ones needs.  A garden means the field that was planted – fruits, vegetables, flowers.  Everyone needs daily diet to eat fruits and vegetables.  Everyone likes flowers for decoration.  All of these come from the garden.  Without the garden, there are no fruits, no vegetables nor flowers.

For example, our Open Door Learning Center has a school garden.  We planted many kinds of vegetables.  We harvest it about every week and we got over 100 lbs of vegetables.  Students can take vegetables home for food.  That means the school garden fulfills some parts of student needs.

On the other hand, about the library: A library means a place or room where there are many story books.  One proverb has said that knowledge is coming from the book.  For example, if we want to know something about knowledge, we can’t find it without books.  Therefore a library can let us know what we need.

So, if we have a garden and a library, we have everything we need.

– Open Door Learning Center student, Lwai Moo

 

Grocery Shopping in the Garden

Teacher Meghan’s class were busy picking and harvesting ripe vegetables in the South Garden. On the menu today are tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, peppers, green beans, peas, radishes, and cucumber!  The class brought home over 14 lbs of vegetables today!

Flower Arranging

 

 

On Friday, students from the Employment Readiness class picked flowers and made beautiful flower arrangements.  The flowers were given to Arlington Hills Lutheran Church for church service on Sunday. It is a small way to say thank you to our generous church partner.