My name is Michael Frank (Señor Frank to my students). I manage our school garden here at Meadow Glen Elementary School and run our weekly garden club for our students.
There are over 200 posts on the blog as of this date. Most were written by me and include updates showing how our school garden is growing and illustrations of gardening and growing techniques we use in our garden that you might find valuable.
However, our garden club students are also required to write blog posts. Their posts can be descriptions of their own gardens and gardening experiences, research-based descriptions of plants, animals, or insects that can be found in or around our garden, or even recipes for dishes cooked with fresh ingredients from our school garden.
If you are a visitor to our blog, I’d ask you to please click one of the links below to read the posts written by our students and then write comments on them. Your comments could be just a positive encouraging message or a note about a detail in their post that you found interesting. It could also be a suggestion for further research or of a book or other educational resource that would help our students continue learning about their chosen topic.
Our garden club members write their blog posts for you, our visitors, to read. When they get feedback, they realize they are writing for an audience and it encourages them to continue learning independently so they can keep sharing what they learn.
Below is a list of topics garden club students have written about. By clicking the “widgets” box in the upper right hand corner of the blog home page you can search for these terms and find student-written posts to read and comment on. I will update this list as students continue to add posts to the blog.
Blossom’s scientific name is genus prunus. A blossom is normally pink but can come in shades of white, red, blue, yellow, purple, black, or brown. That’s a lot of colors!
By the way the word blossom came from the old English word blostm, which means “flower“ or “Bloom” the word “bloom.”It has been used in English since the late 1200s.
A blossom can be annual or perennial; depending on the species. Almond blossoms are crushed and used as healers for sunburn or for dry skin. The crab apple blossom was used to heal splinters, boils, coughs, colds, and wounds were also used to heal bee stings and more.
Here are some fun facts about blossoms:
Each cherry blossom tree has both male and female flowers!
Some cherry blossom trees can live up to 100 years!
Yesterday at our garden club meeting we learned a little about the Organic Grower’s School Spring Conference Señor Frank attended in Mars Hill, NC this past weekend, and then we went out in the garden to plant our giant beets and our underwear!
The view from one of the academic buildings at Mars Hill University.
We saw our friend Jason Roland teaching a class about organic soil amendments at the conference and our other farmer friend Noah East of Wild East Farm teaching a class about turning your homestead into a true farm business.
Jason…And Noah!
We learned about Ira Wallace, the godmother of organic seed saving and manager of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.
Ira Wallace
And we learned about Western North Carolina storyteller Doug Elliot and watched a video about him. Here’s a video with a story and a song about strawberries that Doug performed at the conference.
Sal’s Giant Beet Contest
The Giant Beet Contest is an event sponsored by our friend Sallie Sharpe of Grow Your Garden with Sal. Señor Frank had participated in the contest back in 2020 at his old school growing both Giant Mangel Beets and a giant Asian radish. That year his students’ radish grew bigger than the beet, but they had a lot of fun watching it grow and harvesting it. Sallie even came to the school to help us pull it up!
This year we have schools from multiple states participating in the Giant Beet Contest. There will be students in 10 states growing these beets and comparing their results! Some of them are far away in different cold hardiness zones like New York, Florida, Texas, and even Alaska! (We hope to hear from all of the schools who participate in this contest right here on our blog!)
The Soil Your Undies Challenge
The Soil Your Undies Challenge began in Oregon back in 2018 when farmers decided they wanted to show people how good healthy soil works. With the help of Oregon Soil and Water Conservation Districts throughout the state, farmers made a plan to bury pairs of white 100% cotton underwear in a field somewhere on their farm. After waiting 90 days, the farmers dug up the underwear and took a picture posing with the “soiled” underwear.
Over the course of the 90 days the underwear were in the ground, soil bacteria and fungi would eat and decompose the cotton fabric of the underwear. The healthier the soil, the less cotton fabric would be left at the end of the 90 days! That’s because healthy soil is ALIVE! It contains billions of microscopic organisms that break down organic matter into nutrients plants need to grow.
Notice how in this picture very little of the cotton fabric is left on the three pairs of underwear these boys buried in their farm field. That’s because cotton is organic. It was produced by a cotton plant and it was once alive!
Notice how the waistbands of those underwear look untouched. The waistband is made of man-made fibers like polyester and polymer synthetic rubber. Materials like those should not be added to soil since the bacteria and fungi that live in soil can’t break them down. (That’s why we don’t add things like plastics to our compost bins!)
Señor Frank came up with the idea of doing a Soil Your Undies Challenge at schools right here in South Carolina this spring and Sallie Sharpe decided to help us expand our challenge by offering a free pair of white cotton undies to schools across the country so they could join us! We hope other schools will take the challenge and share their results this Spring!
Watch the video below to see all of what we did at our garden club meeting yesterday including planting our giant beets and burying our undies!
*You might have heard one of the students mention sprinkling a little of Jason Roland’s soil in the bed with the beets, or the “magic soil”. You see, Jason moved to Ellerbe, NC just this month after growing up on his family’s farm in Red Bank, SC here in Lexington County. Jason is one of my very best friends and one of the top young organic farmers in the state. Before he left for Ellerbe, I recorded an interview with him on his land and at the end I asked him for a jar of his soil to remember the farm by – and to add to my gardens so they’d have some of his Jason Roland magic.
But don’t worry. As this would be an unfair advantage in the giant beet contest, we will hold off on adding Jason’s soil to the bed where they are growing!
How many tools does your family own? What do you do when something at your house breaks?
Up here in the Asheville, NC area you might just borrow a tool or send the thing you broke to the WNC Repair Cafe!
Watch this video of Shelby, one of the volunteers who works for the Repair Cafe explaining who they are and what they do!
Did you know that the Richland County Library in downtown Columbia has a library of things? You can borrow tools or even cooking utensils from the library. They even have a maker space where you can build things or do crafts and a few 3D printers! There’s a seed bank you can take seeds from and tools like shovels you can borrow to help you start a garden at home in your yard!
What do you think? Is this a good idea? Would you or your family borrow a tool if you needed it for a project around the house instead of buying it? Would you bring something to a repair cafe to have it fixed instead of throwing it away?
This weekend I’m up in Mars Hill, a small college town just north of Asheville, NC.
Meredith and I are staying in a workshop space on an old farm just north of town with a small creek and a pond next to it.
My good friend Jason was one of the first speakers at the conference with his talk on Brewing Better Soil – all about making compost tea to feed the soil and your plants. As you can see from the video above, I was a little late to his talk…
I didn’t catch any fish…
When I got to Mars Hill I noticed this new mural. Do you recognize the green moth?
This is the gate to the college – Mars Hill University.
The town and college are really pretty with the mountains of Western North Carolina all around them.
This is the view from one of the academic buildings. There are a lot of small businesses in town including this art gallery. I thought their sign was interesting. Why did they choose those three colors for their sign?I’m not sure why there’s a suit of armor in front of this Mexican restaurant!
Jason’s talk had a lot of people in the audience! It’s always fun to see him teaching other farmers and seeing how much they respect him and value what he has to teach them. People always stay after his talks to ask him for advice about what they should do on their farms.
After Jason’s talk I gave him some seeds I had brought him from our garden. He will be planting our celosia and amaranth at his new farm in Ellerbe, NC this summer to help support the pollinators there.
I wanted to go to a talk by Ira Wallace after Jason’s talk…
On the way to the building where Ira was giving her talk, I went past the seed swap table and I couldn’t help stopping to look through the seeds! I found 3 new varieties of okra for us to grow this summer and a whole lot of Bloody Butcher corn seeds! (Just like I said I would probably find, Jay!)
I left a lot of our Hibiscus Roselle seeds, many packets of onion seeds that we would not be able to grow in SC, and some strange and different winter squash seeds that the organic farmers up here in Western NC would be interested in growing for markets here. I have come to this conference for 4 or 5 years in a row and always forget to bring seeds to share. I’ve taken many, many seeds from the swap table over the years and thought it was only fair that I bring some of ours to share this year. The man who collects the seeds for the swap table and manages it at the conference was really happy to get our donation. He said it was like Christmas!
As I was about to leave for Ira’s talk, I noticed a lady sitting at a table with information about an urban garden in Memphis, Tennessee. I stopped to talk to her about their program and to collect information about it to share with you all. I also mentioned our school garden blog to her and the way we grow peas. She seemed really interested in the technique, so I gave her the link to our blog. I also asked her to share our blog with the gardeners there in Memphis so they could read our blog posts.
So of course I arrived at the Grow More, Stress Less class by Pam Dawling and Ira Wallace late…. And when I got to the classroom the door was locked and a lady who worked for the conference was sitting outside the door turning people away! I asked if she would open the door so I could sit at the door and listen, and she let me do that, but I couldn’t even really hear anything so I decided to leave and try to get into another class a few minutes later.
I should have known Ira’s class would be popular. Ira Wallace is a 76 year old lady who is originally from Florida where she grew up growing much of the food her family ate in their large garden. Her grandmother taught her how to grow vegetables. She is now one of the directors of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, one of the largest organic seed businesses in the country. She is known as the godmother of seed saving and is very highly respected in the organic farming community.
I ended up going to a class called From Homestead to Farm Business that was being taught by this guy…
That guys should look familiar to you. You had the chance to talk to him back in the fall. It’s Noah East of Wild East Farm up in Marion, NC!
Noah did a great talk about how he and his wife Lyric and two friends who work on the farm developed their leased property into a diverse market garden where they raise vegetables, meat producing farm where they raise chickens, turkeys, and pigs, and a fruit orchard that will eventually be allowing you-pick opportunities for Asian pears, persimmons, blueberries, pawpaws, and more!
Noah shared lots of information about how he and Lyric started the farm including details that even I hadn’t heard before. (Remember, I visited the farm back in September 2024 just before Hurricane Helene and had gotten a private tour and interview from Noah!) He talked about how to plant pawpaw trees to get them established, how to copice trees like black locust so they re-grow into thin seedlings that can be cut again to use as strong poles for building on the farm or used as fire wood, how to plan so that the entire farm can be managed by just 4 people working just enough to keep everything going, how to feed broiler chickens to make them grow fast, but also stay healthy, and how to make sure pigs don’t escape out of their pastures!
There were so many details in his talk that it will be its own blog post, but one thing he said in his talk that stuck with me was this. Noah said that starting out as homesteaders a lot people romanticize the idea of staring their own small farm to feed their families. They seem to want the freedom to grow their own food, but don’t necessarily want to do the work that comes with that lifestyle. He said that there are no shortcuts or options not to do the things you don’t want to do in life. He said that there were definitely farm chores that he does not like, but he forces himself to do them because he knows they are necessary. He said that if you want to do something correctly and well, you have to do ALL the work. “There is no world in which we do only what we want to do and nothing of what we don’t want to do.”
A couple of weeks ago I noticed a change in our pollinator garden. The plants that had been totally brown and dead were showing signs of new life! These perennial plants – plants that die back to their roots and re-grow every year – were sprouting new leaves or shoots and in many cases growing whole new plants from roots that had grown far away from where the parent plant had been planted last year spreading, in some cases, 4 or 5 feet from that spot.
Check out this video that shows what these plants looked like as they started re-growing and remember to keep an eye on them when you see them in the garden and observe how they grow and develop this year. It’s really important to know what all of the plants in our garden look like if you’re going to be working in the garden so you can avoid stepping on the ones we want to grow and so you only pull out weeds, not our flowers!
The scientific name for peaches is Prunus persica.
The type of names peaches is:
Clingstone, freestone, and semi-freestone.
Peaches are native to northwest china.
Peaches prefer well-drained soil and full sun exposure habitats.
Peaches are not annual not biennial but they are perennial.
They get 15-25 feet tall.
Peaches get flowers early spring
The flowers colors are: light-pink, and red and the size of them 1 inch(2.54 cm) in diameter.
Peaches are not a host plant.
Peaches are edible.
Peaches are a fruit.
These are the ways you can eat peaches: slice peaches and put them into crepes, add sliced peaches into a salad, make a peach pie, mango smoothie, grill peaches, and more.
Peaches grow best in loamy soil.
These are techniques on how to grow peach trees
1.You plant them in late winter or early spring
2.Select a cultivar for your climate
3.Pollination
4.Thinning
5.Proper watering, fertilization, and pruning techniques.
These are insect pest that might attack peaches: plum curculio, oriental fruit moth, peachtree borer, shothole borer, lesser peachtree borer, catfacing insect, scale, japanese beetle, green june beetle, brown marmorated stink bug, greater peachtree borer.
We have a peach tree at meadow glen but the peaches have not grown yet but I am so excited
because I have already tried peaches and they taste so good and they are going to taste even better because they are fresh from the garden.
And an interesting fact about peaches are that they are related to plums, apricots, cherries, and almonds.
Make sure that you leave a comment so that you can teach me and others. Have a good day!
It’s February 5th which means Valentine’s Day is coming up pretty soon and chocolate is one of the treats that represent Valentine’s Day. But do most of you know how chocolate is made and what plant it comes from? Well actually what tree it’s from and how it started off? Well this post will explain all of that. First chocolate started off as a drink. For 4,000 years ancient Olmec people in ancient Mesoamerica (now known as Mexico and Central America) consumed chocolate in a drink form. This is what the drink looked like.
This drink was known as Xocolatl and was made with cacao beans which were bitter, also mixed with water, and some spices like chilli and herbs which made the drink spicy. In ancient times Xocolatl was drunk during rituals and sometimes used for medicine. We did soon get to our chocolate that we have today by adding sugar and milk to the cacao bean which makes the chocolate we know today sweet, not bitter, and not spicy. Now what gives chocolate the cocoa taste that mainly makes chocolate well… Chocolate! Well I’m glad you asked. So these beans called cacao beans that are in pods really give chocolate its choco taste. The cacao bean is grounded up and then mixed with milk and sugar to become yummy chocolate. This is what cacao beans in a pod look like.
As you can see a lot of cacao beans come in one pod which is good because people produce a lot of chocolate. Cacao pods grow on cacao trees that look like this.
I guarantee you learned something new about chocolate today in this post. Type In the comments something about chocolate or one of your favorite desserts contains chocolate. My favorite dessert with chocolate is definitely mint chocolate chip ice cream!
sites : National geographic kids, magnum ice cream
About a week ago I spotted pale yellow flowers on some weedy looking plants that were growing along the roadside in my neighborhood in downtown Columbia, SC. It was growing in hard clay soil behind a sidewalk on a heavily traveled road in an area where people sometimes throw their trash out of their car windows or just drop fast food cups and food wrappers as they walk by.
I could only see the flowers through the windshield of my car as I turned the corner heading to school that morning, but I immediately knew from the cross shape of the small four-petaled flowers what they were…. And what it meant when I saw them.
They were the flowers of a plant in the brassica family (a plant family that is also called the cruciferous vegetable family due to their cross-shaped flowers), and even though we had had snow fall here in the SC midlands about a week earlier, they meant that spring was on its way. These particular brassicas were probably wild radishes, but we will see yellow blanketing farm fields in coming weeks as wild cabbage, turnip, and radish plants begin to bloom. These plants are the descendants of crops planted here for hundreds of years that have been growing in farmers’ fields, open meadows, empty city lots, and roadsides ever since. These are brassica plants that originated as a wild mustard in Eastern Europe and Greece that people bred and crossed to make the vegetables we know as cabbage, turnip, radish, broccoli, kale, kohlrabi, and many more. They have grown where their seeds have blown for generations after they escaped farmers’ fields over the years and every spring some of them bolt and put on a light to dark mustard yellow colored show.
But wild brassicas aren’t the only flowers that let us know that the days are getting longer as the Earth tilts its top half (The Northern Hemisphere) back toward the sun and spring draws near. There are a number of “wildflowers” that you’ll see blooming in large numbers in agricultural fields this time of year turning the land into a blur of color as you speed by on your way down the highway in your car.
I’d like to introduce you to some of them so that if you are taking a road trip with your family and you’re looking out the window, you might be able to guess at what plants are putting on that show for you painting the landscape colors and providing some of the first nectar for bees and other pollinators as they come out of hibernation, hatch, or emerge from chrysali or cocoons and start to forage.
The light purple steak you see in the middle of this picture is either Henbit or Purple Dead Nettle. Both of these plants are in the mint family and while Purple Dead Nettle is from Europe and Asia, Henbit also originally grew in North Africa. You may have guessed that the wild brassicas are edible, but you might not have thought about eating these low-growing plants with slightly fuzzy dark green to purplish leaves. Well, guess what? You can! In fact the name “Henbit” comes from the fact that chickens will eat this plant if they find it in a farm field!
As the weather continues to warm we will see more flowers grow and bloom along our roadsides and in our fields. As I see these changes this Spring, I will take pictures and post them here with a description of each plant, so check back to learn more about the plants that let us know spring is coming.
The word “chit” refers to a piece of a seed potato that has an eye on it from which an entire plant can grow. The process of cutting your seed potatoes into chunks with viable eyes on them is called “chitting” your potatoes. This process is a great way to grow the maximum number of potato plants from each of your seed potatoes.
The practice of chitting potatoes is fun and easy and it helps you extend your potatoes’ growing season by giving them a head start. Here’s how we did it at school this year.
Here’s what our chits looked like about 3 weeks later. The kids checked them out and I planted them after our garden club meeting.
