Gardening At The Glen – Growing things that are green and kids who love the outdoors!

Welcome visitors! Please read and comment on our posts.

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.

Student Post Topics:

Ground Cherries

The Green Huntsman Spider

The Monarch Butterfly

Okra

Let’s Make Pickles!

The Green Grass Crab Spider

The Scarlet Taninger

Marigolds

The Cayce Plant Exchange

How to grow your own plants at home

Sweet potato and collard greens

First garden club meeting

Happy Thanksgiving! Here Are Some Garden Club Recipes

Did you know that I had another garden blog? My original blog was written on a site called “Kidblog” that is now called “Fanschool”.

Fanschool was difficult to navigate for students and guests to the blog so I switched over to Edublogs as the platform for the blog we write now.

I love to see student recipes on the blog and sometimes I remember them and use them for years!

Here are some of my favorites from years past. Maybe you could add a recipe post so we can all learn to cook your family’s favorite dishes for Thanksgiving!

Roasted Brown Sugar Carrots

https://fan.school/article?id=02lw3w5lyhzmyalkp55pz7pkd

Roasted Sugar Snap Peas

https://fan.school/article?id=0rdpvabu89al4n824nh92rlm6

Sour Cucumbers

https://fan.school/article?id=c9xy26124xo6rhp4zvt5tfj8

Lemongrass Tea

https://fan.school/article?id=7d9ywz64az2uimsrz2pkg3g9o

Kale Chips

https://fan.school/article?id=5jv8e9rireyp1nftmivitege0

Microwave Baked Potatoes

https://fan.school/article?id=6lrhe023d83l50t5w2tdiae42

And here is one of my favorite recipes for Thanksgiving. Winter Squash Soup!

https://fan.school/article?id=9rgn7zyaah2tcg5xgeo7w44hg

Blueberries

Blueberries are one of the only foods that are naturally blue. Blueberries are from the family Heath. Blue berries need bee visitation to produce fruit. Blue berries are used for dye too. Back in the day people used blueberries to make gray paint by boiling the berries in milk. During the holidays in autumn you can but the blueberries flowers and they will look orange and the berries will change with them!

Blueberries scientific name is Vaccinium corymbosum.

Blue berries first cultivated by the daughter of a New Jersey farmer, Elizabeth white( my name!) harvested and sold the first commercial crop of blueberries out of Whitesburg, New jersey in 1916.

Sources: rhs.org.uk/blueberries(search for blue berries)

Garden Update November 4, 2024

The weather is cooling down and our brassica plants are looking good! We added compost from my pile at home to a few of the beds and it seems to be keeping those heavy feeders happy, as well as giving us lots of surprises in the form of volunteer seedlings.

Speaking of volunteers, many of our summer flowers dropped seeds and while the plants that have sprouted from them won’t make it through the winter, some are already blooming. It will be interesting to see how long they hang on as the weather cools. Should we try transplanting some of them into the planter boxes in front of the school?

The white kohlrabi in bed 1 looks good and the row of small Hakurei turnips in front of the kohlrabi was just thinned. Those small turnip plants should grow firm, white, crunchy roots about the size of a golf ball in about a month.

The marigolds are going to be pulled out to make room for cabbage and collards this week.

The white and purple kohlrabi in bed 3 got nibbled by rabbits. We might pull up the ones in the front of the bed to make room for beets or radishes. We will pull the marigolds from the back of this bed too and replace them with cabbage or collards. We might also intercrop with onions. Rabbits don’t like onions so we are hoping the smell of the onions will keep them away from our other plants.

Bed 2 has some of the prettiest cauliflower, broccoli, Mustard-Spinach, and Giant Red Japanese mustard greens that I’ve ever seen growing in it!

Here are the mustard greens with my hand for scale.

In bed 3 we have yellow cabbage-collards in front, Blauwe Groninger Dutch Blue Kale in the middle, and two Giant Red Japanese Mustard plants in the back on the left
side. There are also still Cucamelon vines and a Painted Serpent Cucumber growing on the trellis in this bed.

It’s getting late in the season, but our Cucamelons are still producing!

And there is still a Painted Serpent Cucumber that is fruiting. We will cut this up and have it as a snack next week or the week after.

Our celosia and gomphrena is winding down. We will clear this bed soon to make room for collards, cabbages, and maybe large radishes.

The red celosia flowers in the first bucket are just about finished, but they dropped seed that sprouted in the grass and grew into a new plant! Mr. Woody was kind enough to not mow that little red celosia plant down and now it has flowers on it!

The half dead plant in the bucket to the left is a Jerusalem Artickoke. We will wait for that plant to die back completely and then dig up its roots. The roots (really tubers) are edible and can be eaten raw, pickled, made into relish or chow chow, or boiled like a potato. They’re a North American native food that was used by Native Americans who carried the tubers with them to plant when they moved from place to place. This helped to spread them across the continent.
Jerusalem Artichokes taste sort of like a potato when boiled or like a water chestnut when raw, but they have a sunflower seed flavor to them. That’s because this plant is in the sunflower family.

In bed 2 we are seeing LOTS of volunteer plants popping up. That’s because we added compost from the compost pile at my house and the seeds of the vegetables I put on the pile did not die. If you look in the middle of this picture you’ll notice tomato seedlings growing under the broccoli. These seedlings won’t survive the cold weather that’s coming, so there’s no reason to try to move them to a spot where they will get more sun.

The plant in the middle of this picture with the long leaves with opposite lobes that grow out of a central point is a radish. I don’t know what kind of radish it is or how we got radish seeds in our compost, but it will be fun to see if this plant grows a large root that we can eat. Radishes can grow in colder weather and it would be helpful to move this plant to a sunnier location, but it is very hard to move a plant that has a long taproot like a radish or a carrot. Our best bet is to just leave it where it is and see what happens.

The small plants in The middle of this picture are ground cherries. The seeds that grew into these plants were probably from ground cherry fruits that got dropped in the garden.

We never have any trouble growing ground cherries at school. If I forget to grow them in the greenhouse in the springtime, I know that plenty of new plants will pop up in the garden by themselves. And often the ones that volunteer in the garden grow faster and stronger than the ones that I start from seed myself anyway!

And we’ve had so many marigold flowers this year that the seeds have dropped on the grass and are sprouting outside of our garden beds. Unfortunately, these plants will die when the weather turns cold. It should be interesting to see if they peoduce some flowers for us before that happens.

Pumpkin

Sofia L

The scientific name for pumpkin is Cucurbita, but commonly known as Pumpkin.

The earliest record of domestication is from Mexico where remnants were found. They had been seen growing wild in north eastern Mexico.

Plant Pumpkin in full sun. They can tolerate partial shade. Nutrient-rich soil that drains well is perfect for Pumpkin. Pumpkin plants need to be well watered while growing fruit.

Pumpkin is a vining annual.

Pumpkin needs plenty of space. Their vines can grow 50 to 100 feet a plant. They are planted in raised rows 6 inches or more above the ground. Plant the seeds about an inch deep.

Pumpkin plants will bloom about 8 to 10 weeks after being planted. The blooms are yellow, and star shaped.

Butterflies do like pumpkin blooms, but bees are the ones

Bees are the ones that effectively pollinate pumpkin blooms.

Every part of the pumpkin is edible, including the seeds. They are roasted and eaten as a snack. They’re called pepitas.

Pumpkin is a fruit. It is in the squash family which includes Cucumbers and Melons.

Pumpkin puree can be used to make pumpkin pie. You can buy it in a can, and it may be mixed with other winter squash.

Pumpkin plants prefer full sun. If you grow them off the ground, it improves the air circulation around the plants which reduces fungal diseases, and they aren’t likely to be affected by pests.

Once the pumpkin plant starts growing the fruit, it likes to be watered regularly.

Pests that attack pumpkin plants include –

Beetles
Snails and slugs
Squash bugs
Squash vine borer insects
Cucumber beetles
Aphids

Here are a few of the common pests of pumpkin plants.

A common pest for pumpkin plants are aphids. Insecticidal soap is a good remedy.

Spotted and Striped Cucumber Beetles are another common pest. These beetles like to feed on new growth. Mulch or row covers help to deter them from your plants. Neem oil also helps.

Watermelons

By Ayla A.

Watermelons (Citrullus Lanatus) are quite a large fruit that my mom and I have been growing. The watermelon is a part of the cucurbitaceae family. Watermelons are a juicy fruit. though it usually comes in a deep red, and it can also come in yellow! There is no big difference in taste between the yellow and red watermelon. The way the yellow watermelons get their color is by a molecule called Beta-Carotene, which appears in pumpkins and cantaloupes. If you want a delicious and juicy watermelon make sure it has no cuts or squishy parts. Next is that you can look for a big yellow spot, usually when you see a yellow spot it means that it is sweet. Lastly is that you can pick it up to see if it is heavy. Watermelons are about 90% water, it should be heavy. Watermelon has many vitamins, like vitamin A, vitamin B6, and vitamin C. Vitamin A helps your eyesight, and skin. VItamin B6 and C help with the immune system. My watermelon is yellow, not in the inside, or in a small spot. My watermelon is completely yellow. My mom and I forgot to pick it. Watermelons are very suitable for the summer time, because they have so much water and have a sweet taste. Did you know that in Japan their watermelons are square? Sadly, they are not super sweet. Apparently the watermelon rind is also edible, most likely doesn’t taste good. Hopefully you learned something about watermelons today. Thank you for reading.

source:https://www.watermelon.org/watermelon-101/facts-faqs/

Ireland!

Ok MGES Garden Club members! I know it’s been a couple of weeks since we had a meeting. That’s because I’m on vacation in Ireland!

Right now I’m on a small tour bus leaving the town of Dingle in County Kerry. If you look in LIDL they sell Kerry Gold Irish Butter. This is where it comes from.

If you buy some there’s a chance it might have been made from the milk of one of these cows we just drove past!

Anyway, I have a lot more pictures – and a lot of better ones. I think you’ll be surprised by a lot of what we saw here. Everything here is green. It rains almost daily and the climate is cool, not cold and definitely not hot.

We have seen a fjord, cliffs, gardens, old houses and churches, a sheepdog training demonstration, gone on a crystal factory tour, and much more. I got to stand in the Atlantic Ocean up to my knees looking west toward North America with the sun rising behind me in a town known for its surfing. I got to see a salmon hatchery and look at baby salmon in two rivers. We got to feed baby lambs from bottles and hold Pygmy goats. And yesterday I got to see Skellig Michael Island where Star Wars: The Last Jedi was filmed (from far, far away!)

And I’ve seen lots of plants – everything grows here! Some you might not know, but some might be familiar to you. Some are native to Europe, others are invasive and come from other parts of the world. And some are even edible!

Can you name this flower? Leave your answer in the comments.

I have a lot of pictures to share – and better ones – but I’m going to wait to write more blog posts when we leave so I can keep learning about the places we’re visiting and getting more pictures to bring back.

Hope you’ve had a good couple of weeks off from garden club and you’re making the most of the time to work on garden blog posts. If you see Mrs. Kyzer, Mrs. Storch, Mrs. Zhang, Mrs. Sox, Mrs. Langston, or Mrs. Gray, be sure to thank them for watering the garden while I’ve been gone.

Garden Club Meeting September 19 2024 – Pulling Okra, Container Soil, & Forcing Crocus Bulbs

Ground Cherries

By Davis L and Sullivan L

Ground cherries scientific name is Physalis but they are commonly known as ground cherries. They are sweet like candy and healthy like a fruit or vegetable but ground cherries are a fruit.

They are native to North and South America but the are relatively obscure. They have a paper like outside and opening it is like opening a candy wrapper. They look like a tomato and on the inside they feel like one too. They are small and the color is orange and they have a unique flavor.