Sunflower Houses, Part 1

By Trial Garden Manager Lindsay Del Carlo


We were recently inspired by author Sharon Lovejoy and her book Sunflower Houses which features lots of ideas for gardening with children, and decided to grow our own sunflower house. It’s a fun project to do with kids because they can have their own secret hideout and experience the wonder of these towering plants with huge flowers that are visited by birds, bees and butterflies.
(read more about Sharon at: www.sharonlovejoy.com)

Planting the house
First, choose a sunny site with plenty of room to lay out the “house.” We are making ours a rectangle about eight feet on the long sides and five feet front and back. Scrape away a strip about a foot wide for planting along three sides of the perimeter, leaving an entry opening on the front. Prepare the soil in the planting strip, removing any grass, weeds or stones and turning the soil over. Turn in a few inches of compost into the prepared planting strip and be sure to add an all-purpose fertilizer, working it into the soil.

Sunflower House entrance

We chose to use our Van Gogh Sunflowers to create the walls of the our house. This variety has tall, sturdy straight stalks with uniformly big, bright, sunny yellow flowers. The plants are growing almost daily now and it’s fun to watch the “walls” get taller and taller. 

We also planted pumpkins along the walk that leads to the sunflower house. We will follow up soon when the sunflowers are in full bloom and we invite some kids to play in our house.
 

Pumpkins line the pathway to the house

From Arkansas: School Garden Winter Update from Melinda Smith

Melinda Smith and her colleagues at her Jonesboro, Arkansas elementary school have successfully created the kind of program that is vitally important in the world we are all facing today. In their hands-on “garden classroom” kids learn lessons that incorporate basic science, math, nutrition and the environment. They produce the vegetables and greens used in the “teaching kitchen” where they prepare and cook their produce, learning to make and enjoy healthy meals. Melinda’s challenge is to keep the garden going, move ahead and expand the program.  Read More About the Program

After our busy fall season, we use our garden classroom time in the winter months to be creative with the garden’s bounty both for learning, fun and to do fundraising planning.

(L) Last harvest before frost
(R) Salad making from last lettuce harvest - 6th graders

When the garden is quiet in winter we can cook and craft in the student kitchen with the herbs we harvested from the gardens that the kids have either dried or frozen in ice cubes.

(L) The veggie trug, purchased with Renees Garden customers’ donations, lets us grow
food for our rabbits even in freezing temps.
(R) Our two rabbits, Oreo & Coco live in one of our outdoor classrooms

There’s time now to research new things we want try for the next year, plan for our greenhouse planting for our Spring Sale and plan for our own school garden planting. Since we have unpredictable weather in Arkansas, we do have random and unseasonably warm days when the students and I can do outdoor activities or work in the garden to keep the beds clean.

(L) Greenhouse activity in the winter
(R) Yoga on a cool sunny day

Since our school has an important central theme of environmental consciousness, we look for “upcycling” crafting that we can add to our Spring Sale and for our local farmers market appearances. We received a large collection of wine corks and it was the students’ job to research possibilities and to come up with their own ideas to make items that we could craft and sell to raise money for the garden. From the corks and dried materials from the garden, they designed Christmas ornaments, cork garlands,  cork trivets, earrings, necklaces, key chains, and note pin boards. We also collected discarded CDs and DVDs and made into drink coasters.

(L)Trivets and wall plaque
(CTR) Cork Christmas ornaments
(R) Santa ornaments made from dried okra.

Our most current project is crafting aprons made from old jeans. The students have ownership because they have to find and donate the old jeans. Parents, grandparents, local master gardeners, school staff and fans of our school serve as volunteer seamstresses for the actual apron sewing.

(L) The Apron Project has been a big success.
(R) Aprons from donated jeans made with generous Master Gardener help.

All of these winter activities are both “hands on” learning opportunities for the students and also very helpful towards achieving our goal of our financial sustainability for our Garden to Kitchen educational program and for the care-giving of our school animals throughout the year.

Snow in the garden classroom

LET'S WORK TOGETHER TO HELP: When you donate money Renee's Garden will match up to $500 of the total donations.

Donation checks may be sent to:
Jonesboro Public Schools
2506 Southwest Square
Jonesboro, AR 72401
Attn. Finance Department: For Melinda Smith’s “Little Green Thumbs” Account

Growing Little Gardeners

  - By Sarah Renfro, Renee's Garden Business Manager




My son Mason started preschool this year and I’m pleased that his school incorporates gardening into the curriculum. We have a large front yard garden at home (see my previous blog posts) and of course working at Renee’s Garden has exposed him to growing vegetables and flowers. One of his favorite pretend games is to plant and harvest a vegetable bed (made out of blocks) and cook meals of wooden food from his play kitchen.

So when the preschool teachers asked parents if we had any special skills or hobbies to share, gardening came to mind immediately! The preschool facility is located behind a church which has a community garden plot. The members set aside one of the raised beds for the kids to use and got it prepped with compost and drip irrigation lines.

I brought a variety of seeds and vegetable starts (donated by Lindsay, our Trial Garden manager) and the class took a “field trip” down to the community garden to plant everything. The kids loved digging in the dirt and planting the seeds, although the concept of spacing was a bit lost on them. We will definitely be thinning quite a bit as there were many handfuls of seeds dumped in one spot!

The children will be visiting the garden regularly to see all the stages of growth and harvest the veggies. Of course the grown-up gardeners will be popping in also to give the growing garden little extra TLC!

Here are the Renee’s Garden varieties we planted:
Easter Egg Radishes
Sunshine Orange and Yellow Carrots
Rainbow Bright Lights Chard
All Season Broccoli
Farmer’s Market Blend Lettuce
Oregon Giant Snow Peas

My Edible Front Yard: Year Three

 - By Sarah Renfro, Renee's Garden Business Manager


This is a follow-up to my original post from the summer of 2010, Creating My Edible Front Yard.

We are now finishing up our third year of front yard gardening and are happier than ever with the landscape. The biggest change that we have made is the removal of our massive Liquidambar tree. This tree was gorgeous in the fall but the canopy was shading our vegetable beds in prime summer growing season. Plus all those colorful leaves dropped onto my crops of fall veggies, requiring almost daily cleanup. After weighing the pros and cons, my husband and I decided that the tree must go.

Our garden before: with large Liquidambar tree

In keeping with the edible gardening theme, we selected a Manzanillo Olive as a replacement street tree. I was a bit nervous about the potential mess of a fruiting tree in this high traffic spot, but we harvested the olives before they dropped and enjoyed the process of curing them into salty, tasty treats!

After: with new olive tree

Our garden space now enjoys bright sunlight until late afternoon and we have taken full advantage of this. We removed some of the original perennial plantings from our largest raised bed so we can grow large crops of onions and garlic. We also grew potatoes for the first time this summer (in the large container that our olive tree came in). I had no idea that potatoes could taste so delicious!

Husband Brian loves the garlic harvest

Discovering potatoes!

It has been wonderful to introduce my son to the joy of growing food. His absolute favorite snack is fresh blueberries picked right from the bushes. One day in the middle of playing, he jumped up and ran into the kitchen saying “I want a snack.” Then he ran out the front door and into the garden to fill up on blueberries and strawberries.

Blueberries are my son's favorite

The addition of our backyard chickens (see my “Growing the Girls” post) has yielded an abundance of chicken poop. Of course, this rich fertilizer needs to be mixed and broken down to produce compost that can be added to our garden beds. We’ve developed a mini “dirt farm” to process this organic matter.  We also had success mixing in a slow release fertilizer prior to planting and at regular intervals in the growing season.

Experienced gardeners know that the key to a continuously producing garden is succession planting. It is very tempting to go on a seeding bonanza in early spring – fully planting all the beds at once. Then all your crops are ready at the same time. This year we tried planting our favorite veggies every 2-3 weeks so we had an ongoing supply of radishes, carrots, beets and lettuce. Homegrown salads almost year round!

The garden at work

Not everything has gone perfectly. We have an ongoing battle against leaf miner in our leafy greens – most of our chard and spinach went straight into the yard waste due to infestation. Plus a gopher dug a path of destruction thru several of our (underwired) beds before we called in the resident Renee’s gopher trapping expert, trial garden manager Lindsay del Carlo.

Now that the late summer harvest is in full swing, we have moved onto the next project – food preservation and canning. I hear the hiss of the pressure canner…the subject of a future blog post!