Edible Gardens

Weeding our plant pot:

Look at our awesome sunflowers :-) 
After:



Before: 

Garden Diary # 2: FRIDAY 17 MARCH, ROOM 5

HOW CAN WE MAKE NEW PLANTS?

We did something quite different in the garden today.  We made cuttings and looked at a few ways that we can make new plants.

We can make new plants by growing seeds.  We do this quite a lot.

Sometimes plants make the job easy for us by making new small plants themselves.  We looked at our strawberry plants.  They send out long runners making new plants at intervals along it. When the runners reach the ground they start growing roots.  We can use them by giving the runners a tug and pulling off the new plants to plant elsewhere in the garden or giving away to friends.

Other plants such as mint grow long roots under the ground.  The roots produce small shoots under the ground that pop through the soil where the plant thinks it would be a good place to grow.  Again if we give these a tug, we can plant the roots and shoots into pots to give away, sell or place in other parts of the garden.

Another way to make new plants is to take cuttings.  

I brought in some rosemary and sage from home for us to use.  After making our potting mix, we snipped off the top of the twigs of rosemary, stripped half the leaves off, dipped the stem in honey water and placed into the potting mix.

The sage twigs had small branches of the sides.  We gently pulled these off, removed some of the leaves before dipping them in honey water and placing into the potting mix.

We take the leaves off so that the plant can concentrate on producing new roots instead of feeding all the leaves.

The honey dip is used to protect the cuttings from bacterial and fungual rot.  The honey has special properties that stop the bacteria and fungi from growing.

We placed the cuttings in a warm spot, where they will receive water from the irrigation.

Hopefully in a few weeks we will have some new herbs for our garden!

Great job Room 5.

Garden Diary # 2: Friday 24 March, Room 5

Weather: bright and sunny

Delicious herb and cheese scones

After studying the herbs in our garden a couple of weeks ago, I thought it might be a nice idea to actually cook with some.  So instead of working in the garden, we worked in the kitchen making herb and cheese scones!

We did have to spend a little bit of time in the garden – to harvest our herbs!

Ta da – after baking in a hot oven for 15 mins we had very tasty scones!!

It was a good way to finish off a few weeks of hard work in the garden.

See you again next term!

Edible Gardens: over the last three weeks we have been in the edible gardens learning about herbs. Here a some pictures of us with Mrs Wentworth making planting herb cuttings.