Micro-greens a-growin'!

Our micro-greens have already sprouted. Planted on Monday, our mesclun mix seedlings had almost reached the top of their container by Friday. We could harvest them as early as the formation of their second set of leaves, but we are considering leaving them, thinning them and see how productive a 5"x7" container can be.

We have set-up a grow station for starting our salad boxes and hot weather seeds. It is hard to believe how close the growing season is getting.

MLK Day of Service - Another GSB move toward food security

This year as part of our MLK day of service we completed three projects that are new to our gardens and student's at school and home ability to grow more food during the winter.

For our first project, parents built and added a bamboo trellis to our canoe garden in anticipation of our spring peas, and summer cucumbers and nasturtium. One of our parents has more than enough bamboo growing in her backyard so we harvested bamboo on Friday and brought it to school for our trellises. We will also be adding bamboo trellises to our raised beds once the designs are complete this spring.

Our second project was creating four salad boxes using the University of Maryland Extension's plans. They measure 15x21 and we will be starting them indoors under artificial lights to get a crop or two before moving them outdoors in the spring.

Our third project was recycling plastic grape tomato and salad boxes from the grocery store and creating mini-green houses for micro-greens. Students made and seeded their mini-green houses and took the home to grow.

The plans for the trellises, salad boxes, and mini-green houses were made available for all families to take home and experiment with.

Micro-greens and Peas

We are very excited to get our growing season going this coming Monday as part of our Martin Luther King celebration and day of service. We will be demonstrating how to build and start salad boxes, build mini greenhouses out of reclaimed plastice tomato and salad boxes for microgreens, and building pea trellises for our pea gardens that will be planted in late February or early March.

5th grade students visited Real Food Farm's hoop houses yesterday. They toured the facilities, spoke with the farm manager and farm workers. Real Food Farm has been selling some of their produce at school. Last week they sold out in an hour and one half!

Happy New Year

Well, we've had about 2 ft of snow since I've last written and have been out of school since Friday December 18th. We had just harvested lettuce, spinach, fennel seed, carrots, beets, and radish before the snow came. We also put in the last of our cover crop seed, so we will be interested to see if that ever germinates. Amazingly all the snow has already melted away, but it is bitter cold today with the wind chill - about 11 degrees, brrrrrr.

As the seed catalogs start to arrive we are already thinking about the possibilities for the new growing season.

We hope everyone had a safe and relaxing holiday break!