Potatoes - a follow up

  If you've been following my blog, you might recall that the kiddos and I planted potatoes in the spring.  I read a fantastic children's book, Two Old Potatoes and Me, and we planted old potatoes just like the father and daughter in the story.  You can see the previous posts about it here.

 It's fall now, and the plants had stopped growing, and looked pretty tired.  I decided it was time to dig into the soil around the potato plants, and to see what we might have grown.

 The first thing we all noticed when I dumped out the big bin full of soil and potato plants, was that there were hundreds of worms in the soil.  Big worms, little worms, middle sized worms... lots and lots of happy earth worms.  The children couldn't keep out of it, and happily dug in, searching for potatoes, and thrilled to find the wiggly worms.

 Our "haul" was pretty pitiful.  Only one of our potato plants had any potatoes, and they were very small.  We ended up with just over a handful of new potatoes.  I probably dug them up too soon, but even so, we had very few potatoes.

You are probably thinking that growing the potatoes was a waste of time - if you judge solely by the final yield, that would be true.  So how else could this activity have been of value?

The children spent a lot of time learning about potatoes, literacy, plant growth, and nature.  We read
almost every week, all summer and into the fall.  We learned what color is "periwinkle," and noticed that the child in the book has two homes, one with dad and one with mom.  For children whose home experience is similar, it's very affirming to find characters they can relate to.

The kiddos learned that potatoes have eyes, and that they can grow from them.  We saw some of the pieces of potato rot or get eaten, and then watched as the surviving plants grew.  The children added soil to the pot, burying the base of the plants frequently to encourage potato growth.  They even looked for potato beetles regularly!  They may not ever do it again, but the kiddos know how to grow their own food, and that's a powerful piece of knowledge!

When the children found worms this year, they put them into the soil around the potatoes, and watched as the worms dug down into the soil.  Obviously those worms survived and thrived, evidenced by the massive crop of worms we found. I dumped the soil and potato plants into the vegetable garden for us to dig through, so the worms and the soil is now nourishing the garden, ready for another crop.  We also learned that worms are not boys and girls, but hermaphrodites - they are both male and female! 

So no, this crop of potatoes is not going to go very far. I'm going to make mashed potatoes with them, but will have to supplement with store bought potatoes to make enough for us all to enjoy.  Still, I'm happy with the return on the investment:  we grew some children, right along with the potatoes!

It Must Be Summertime...

 It may only be the beginning of June, but here in Texas, it sure feels like summertime!  When the temperature hits 90*, it's time to break out the popsicles.  This was the first popsicle of the summer.

 With summer break here, we have some old friends graduating, and new friends starting.  My main focus for this week and next is making that transition, reestablishing routines, and learning about each other.  If we can add in some fun and a few popsicles, all the better!

 I've started turning on the misters while we are outside.  It's funny how children and adults see things differently.  To me the mister is a lovely cooling device, a spot to stand for a moment to cool off.  Do the children see it that way?  No!  They think it's a shower.  Or if they bring buckets over, maybe a bath tub, or the beginnings of delicious mud soup.

Here are some of the other things going on at school right now...

Quiet moments with friends, looking for ducks and herons, or maybe turtles...

 The cabbage plants that flowered a month ago are drying up now - and releasing their seeds as they do.

 The children spent a lot of time this week picking the tiny seeds out of the seed pods, and gathering them in envelopes or tiny cups.

 They enjoyed it so much, and were getting such great fine motor work outs doing it, that I brought them inside to work on after lunch one day.  They collected hundreds of seeds!  One day next week I'll have them count them out and glue them in groups of ten, so we can find out just how many there were.

Do you remember the nasty old carefully nurtured potatoes I wrote about a couple of weeks ago?  You can see that post here.  They are growing beautifully!  Not all of them survived, but there are several plants growing, and the children have already helped me add soil around them twice.  Potatoes will grow in the space between the original planting, and the top of the soil, so we'll keep adding soil as the plants grow, and hopefully have a delicious harvest in a couple of months.

 My kindergarteners helped me pick beans, strawberries and tomatoes at a neighbor's house one afternoon this week.  Their garden is so much more bountiful than mine!  It was such a pleasure for us to search for green beans, hiding under the leaves, and for ripe red tomatoes.  One of the children kept picking tomatoes, and telling me they were "as red as candy".  Guess what?  They tasted like candy too!

 Look closely at this child's smile... yes, that is a strawberry in her mouth!

One more fun activity that I want to share this week is our "junk box exploration".  Yes, I know, junk box sounds... lovely.  Just what you'd want your child to play with.  Really.  The truth of the matter is, the children loved this so much, they begged to have it again the following day - and we did.

 So what exactly is "junk box exploration?"  Just what it sounds like.  Over the years I've collected lots of little bits of junk that I know will fascinate the kiddos. 

Do you remember being a child?  Do you remember what fascinated you, and what you wanted to play with and check out?  I remember being fascinated with paper - any kind of paper.  Little pieces of colored paper, the marvelous acordian folded dot matrix printer paper with the tearable seams... any paper!  I also loved the junk drawer in our kitchen.  I never knew what I might find in the junk drawer: keys, coins, buttons, rubber bands, book marks, lost game pieces... treasure!  Maybe I've made this collection for myself more than for the kiddos, but they love it just as I did.

Looking at these pictures, I see a block the boys played with when they were little, a coin purse one of them used for a short time, a glow in the dark star that was once on the ceiling above the bunk bed, a plastic top that used to be in my treasure box at school, a key ring - from where?, a tiny yellow traffic cone that may have been Bob the Builder's, a cork, a marker lid - how many of those have we worn out over the years?, the bow from a Snow White dress - the one we could hardly get off a daycare child long ago- it was so loved.  There's a white pinecone left over from a craft project, tiny plastic mazes the boys were given one Halloween, the magnet from a magnadoodle toy... all flotsam and jetsom of my life as a teacher and a mommy. 

When I think about it, this is not really a junk box at all.  It's a memory box, already full of memories for me, and just beginning to open itself to possibilities for the children.  Little wonder they see it as a treasure!

In the vegetable garden this week...

 I recently discovered an awesome gardening book (fiction) for children, and had to get a copy for our class.  Two Old Potatoes and Me was written by John Coy (see it on his website here) and illustrated by Carolyn Fisher, and it is perfect for our farm theme.

I found some old potatoes growing in my pantry this morning planned ahead and let some potatoes sprout in the pantry, so we could observe them, read the book, and plant our spuds like the characters in the book.  We compared a sweet potato, a russet, and some sprouting baby yukon golds.  The children noticed a lot of similarities and differences between the potatoes, as well as discovering the eyes, and of course the growing sprouts and roots.

When we went outside a little while later, we put a layer of potting soil in a large tub...

 ... and started our own potatoes growing.  We'll add layers of soil as they grow, to hill up around them, and hopefully in a few months we'll have potatoes to eat!

 We won't have to wait that long for our green beans - they have sprouted!  We had a hard, soaking rain earlier this week, and the following day the beans began peeking through the soil.  The children are fascinated by the seed coat falling off,  and tiny leaves growing.

 We're observing them every day, watching their progress. 

This week our pumpkins - the ones that have sprouted from our old jack-o-lanterns (read previous posts about that here), have started to bloom. 

Unlike most flowers, squash blossoms are either male or female.  This is a male blossom, it has a single stamen in the center, female squash blossoms have a ring of five stigma, and a baby fruit growing from the base.  Once you see them side by side, you'll have no trouble differentiating!  The male flowers always start first, and are prolific.  These are the ones we eat!  We're careful to leave the female flowers, so they can bear fruit for us.  Want to know more about eating squash blossoms?  Here is a link.

See how many I picked on just this one day?  We have about a dozen flowers each day right now, and they are best in the early morning.  My friends come running to get a taste of them!

I tear off the petals, and discard the stamen and stem areas.  Squash blossoms remind me a little of the flavor of cucumbers - very mild, but slightly sweet.  Yummy!

There's one more fun thing we've been watching in the veggie garden this week - lots of ladybugs!  One of my kiddos is very into ladybugs, and knows that they eat aphids - and the children wanted me to show them what aphids look like.  When they asked a month ago, I hadn't seen any, but this week I found them swarming on our old cabbage plants that have gone to seed - we ate those blossoms too by the way!  Here's what these aphids look like - tiny little gray-green bugs.

 Now I understand why there are also ladybug pupa on the cabbage plants, as well as adult ladybugs!  I'm hoping to find some larvae and maybe some eggs too, so I can show the children the whole life cycle!