While our Vermont garden sleeps under a blanket of deep snow, the children at school are creating their dream designs for Planting Day, 2015. We’re also incorporating the wishes of our kitchen chef, Kim Kinney. She’d like more onions, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, spinach, beets and summer squash. Each developmental age brings its own special style of dreams to our garden planning. Older students made a list of vegetables on a white board for younger students to copy. I’m hoping to enlist as many classes as possible in the planning process. For older children there are opportunities to plan for space and graph to scale. For younger students, thinking about whether to draw vegetables growing above or under the ground might be challenge enough. For all children this presents a real world chance to create a dream plan in written form and to share it with their peers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Helping this week are our Master Gardener candidate, Kathleen Hacker and a new summer Keene State College Dietician intern, Casie Reynolds. Casie and another student intern will be working with children during our summer school program in July and August 2015.

Before we began our garden maps, students and teachers created a low cost delicious lentil soup using some of our own garden onions, garlic, carrots and tomatoes and a few locally grown veggies. (See recipe below)

Recipe: Winter Lentil Vegetable Soup