End of the Year 5th grade

Our garden club celebrated the end of the year with a small morning feast.  Everything we ate came from the earth.  Black bean salsa with corn, tomato, pepper, onion, chiles, avocado, and seasoned with lime juice, olive oil, cumin, and cilantro.  We had veggie pizza seasoned with basil from our herb garden and a salad with romaine and green leaf lettuce.  This lettuce and basil began in our aquaponics towers and was then transplanted outside when the weather was nice.  We found that it grew quickly with the rain we had.

Cucumbers from our garden were served at the 5th grade end of year pizza party. (We needed something healthy to go with the chips and soda!)  Our tomato plants will be ready to harvest from soon.  Students continued to pick a mint sprig, chive or sage if they like spicy, as they went out to recess.  The honeysuckle on the playground was also enjoyed by all during the month of May.  We love seeing our children excited about the wonders that come from the earth.  Each year we teach that you can eat some things right out of the ground without fear.  All of our things are grown organically, mulched with newspaper to reduce weeds and pests.

As a final project, each 5th grade class built a bat box, each with the capacity to hold a large colony of bats.  This was our idea to help with mosquito control in an environmentally conscious way.  Students in math class looked at plans and figured out how much wood we had to buy.  We measured and cut lumber then put it together with a power drill.  They loved this part!  Some students were involved with staining the boxes to protect them from weather.  We will work on hanging these next school year.  Bats usually look for these in early spring. 

It has been a great year working with aquaponics, gardening inside, and garden club, gardening outside.  We see the value of organically grown food and the myriad ways food can be prepared in delicious ways using herbs and spices.  We have laughed over honeysuckle nectar and herbs to clean the palate or refresh our senses.  And finally, we enjoyed building something to help our animal neighbors that help us in return.

Happy Summer!