I'm not Mrs. McGregor

"Once upon a time there were four little rabbits, and their names were- Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter. They lived with their Mother in a den in a sandbank, underneath the root of a very big fir tree.

"Now my dear," said old Mrs. Rabbit one morning, "you may go into the fields or down the lane, but don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden. Your Father had an accident there. He was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor."

-The Tale of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter

Today, the children's garden was received an unexpected visitor- a very funny, friendly bunny. To the great amusement of the children, the rabbit that we had seen occasionally frequenting the garden in the morning to munch on the melon leaves, decided that it wanted to become our garden's first resident rabbit.

All morning long, the rabbit ignored the throng of gleeful children less than eight feet away and busied itself with digging a large rabbit hole in the middle of the garden's mulch pile. I must say, I was quite pleased when one little two year old girl correctly applied a concept we had learned in our arthropod unit and stated "It's camouflaged!"

After the rabbit seemed satisfied with it's hole, it busied itself with hopping around the yard, collecting mouthfuls of fresh grass and returning to the hole to line its den. It seemed completely oblivious to the din of the children playing in the yard, and even when it was briefly given chase by the elated children, it remained undeterred from its relocation efforts.

During lunch, the bunny decided to keep the children company. She found a shady spot under the tree (right in the middle of the yard, 25 feet from the patio where the children were eating) and munched on some fresh grass while the children finished their lunches. Afterwards, she returned to her den in the mulch pile, climbed inside, and has not been seen since.

Perhaps our little garden is destined to become the pantry of a little bunny brood. Good thing I'm not Mrs. McGregor!

Fava Beans

The Fava Beans were finally ready for harvesting (this proverbial spring delight came a little later than normal as we held off due to unfavorable planting conditions). Fava Beans are undoubtedly one of the best plants to grow in a children's garden; these ancient beans are incredibly hardy, prolific, and resilient. Most children absolutely adore gathering their large floppy pods and appreciate their buttery texture and sweet, nutty flavor.

Fava Beans are one of the oldest cultivated plants; they are also full of fiber, iron, and so much protein that they have been called "the meat of the poor" and credited with saving Sicillians from starvation during times of famine. Additionally, they happen to be quite good for the soil (they fix nitrogen and fertilize the soil).

Today was the perfect afternoon to wander out to the garden and fill a small basket with these bumpy string beans.

Then the fun began! The labor intensive process of shelling Fava Beans, which happens to be the main downside to Fava Beans from an adult perspective is one of the most appealing aspects for children in this plane of development. The children began by stringing and shucking the beans in order to free them from the spongy batting of the pod.

Then, they were briefly parboiled, making it possible for the children to remove the glistening beans from their waxy membranes.

The children were completely happy to eat the Fava Beans raw, as they would with shelled edemame; however, they also prepared a special snack of Afghan Fava Bean Spread.

We combined the Fava Beans, some olive oil, garlic, and zahtar in a food processor (a Middle Eastern spice consisting of sumac, toasted sesame seeds, thyme, marjoram, savory, and salt that had been muddled together in a mortar and pestle).

We served our Afghan Fava Bean spread on grilled flat bread for a yummy special snack straight from the garden.

First Harvest: French Breakfast Radishes

This week marked the first harvest from the school's vegetable garden. These beautiful French Breakfast Radishes provided the first opportunity for children to take the harvest basket out to the garden and return with fresh vegetables. The pleasure of plucking them from the garden beds was more than sufficient to pre-dispose the children to a fondness for them (despite the peppery heat and astringency of this relative of turnips and horseradish).

Upon returning to the classroom, the children carefully cleaned them (remembering the technique demonstrated by "Farmer Mike"), and walked around munching on them as if they had been entrusted with a cache of lollipops.

Preparing food together and sharing in the harvest is both a bond of community and one of the ways in which people nurture each other. The children were very eager to share this experience (and the food they had grown) with their families. In the afternoon, some of the older children came up with the idea of taking them home to share with their parents . They practiced their handwriting and bow tying skills by making little radish bouquets for each student to take home and add to their supper salad.
Later, the children re-planted the radish bed, ensuring that there will be more leisurely afternoons of radish-picking this summer and this time, they were able to prepare the beds independently!

I daresay, Farmer Mike would be proud!

Mud and Puddles

"The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful."

-E.E. Cummings, In Just-

After two days of frost, drizzle, and even a light dusting of snow, the storm finally cleared enough for us to don our Wellies and resume our Spring planting.

Needless to say, there was a lot of important work to be done: puddles to jump in,

mud to muck in, damp garden beds to explore with friends (populated with an abundant supply of wriggling worms, frenzied birds, the first radish sprouts, and wild mushrooms poking up between the garlic bulbs),

and one of my favorite language lessons: writing the garden. In Montessori classrooms, children repeatedly trace sandpaper letters to learn the correct formation of letters. As a result, once they acquire the finger strength and fine motor coordination necessary for handwriting, they usually explode into the "spontaneous" ability to write letters, numbers, and words. This is very exciting for the child! Upon discovering that they can write, most children desperately want to write everything (names of their friends, the menu from lunch, letters to their parents, etc). This morning, one boy appointed himself the task of making his own signs for the garden and walking outside to stake them in their correct spots in the raised beds. I must say, they turned out quite nicely.
Later, we went out as a group and planted four kinds of heirloom beans- some pretty stringless ones in assorted colors for eating (Red Swan, Climbing French, and Golden Crescent) and some for shelling (Slow Foods Arc of Taste Hidasta)- some peas (Dwarf Gray Sugar and Green Arrow for shelling), and some broccoli raab/rapini (pungent, Italian "broccoli"- actually a relative of the turnip).


We concluded our planting with a little tasting of some broccoli, sugar snap peas, and haricot vert that was very well received.

My sincerest thanks and gratitude to Anna Applebaum at Mapleton Montessori (Boulder, CO) for the "Writing the Garden" work. I never think of Summer in your classroom without envisioning children hand writing lists of vegetables they want to plant in the garden and their darling handwritten garden signs.

Dirt is for Digging

"Of course we must adapt according to conditions, but ideally there is a light airy classroom that opens into a lovely yard, and the children have the freedom to be inside or outside as they wish.

The yard should contain both a cultivated and a wild part. It should consist of a lawn, a flower garden, and a place for the children to plant. There should be appropriate tools, real adult tools with short handles, and a shed to clean and store them."

-Maria Montessori

Upon their return from Spring Break, the children were delighted to find that the seeds they started had begun to germinate.

Today marked the children's first day in the newly constructed garden! Young children are sensorial explorers; as a result, all Montessori cultural units begin with a concrete experience which engages all of the child's senses.

As a group, the children received a detailed orientation to the new garden. To commence our gardening, and our unit on annelids (segmented worms), the children began by turning over a small plot of dirt to see what animals live in the soil. The children were very excited to find a large variety of earthworms, some millipedes, and some earthworm cocoons!

Children are consummate naturalists! The children collected some (57!) earthworms. They measured the worms and closely observed the parts of the worms, how they moved, and their reaction to light. Many of the children wanted to feel the worms wriggle in the palms of their hands, while others preferred to observe at a distance. After a bit, they released the worms back into the plot and watched them scrunch back into their burrows.

For the rest of the day, the vast majority of the children abandoned the swingset and sandbox in favor of working in the garden, digging for worms, or transporting loads of dirt to no place in particular in the wheelbarrow. This might be surprising to some people, but not to a trained Montessorian! One of Dr. Montessori's most astute observations of children was that they prefer actual work to pretend or unstructured play. Dr. Montessori created a large variety of Practical Life activities which invite the child to carry out activities that imitate the way that an adult uses familiar objects to carry out a real task. These activities are uniquely adapted to the child's interests and lure the child into mental and physical activity because they contain the promise of taking part in real adult work; however, there is one crucial difference- because the activity meets the child's needs, they are driven to repeat the work, even though it serves no external purpose.

Later, the children learned about composting and christened the new bin with it's first load of lunch scraps.

Gardening and composting are considered "Care of the Environment" activities. They permit children to contribute positively to the classroom community and to the social group (creating an authentic sense of self-esteem), and demonstrates our confidence in, and respect for, the child by permitting them to take part in "important work."

The Garden is Ready!

We have been very excited about creating a gardening space at Bloom! We feel that hands-on, experiential learning about photosynthesis, composting, and biodiversity are extremely important for children this age. We believe that these experiences help children to try new foods, assist children in developing a more sophisticated palate, provide them with a practical understanding of where their food comes from, and provide them with nutritional habits that will set them up for a lifetime of physical well being.

Additionally, there are an increasing amount of studies which have shown that exposure to nature can aid physical healing, decrease symptoms of ADD, depression, and behavioral issues, improve social interaction and social bonding, and even research which shows that children who have access to natural play spaces (as opposed to concrete, or over-groomed, play spaces) exhibit higher levels of creativity, problem solving ability, and cooperation. Scientists have even put forth what is called the "biophilia hypothesis," the idea that human beings posses an innate attraction to nature and that natural environments contribute to feelings of peace and well being.

Earlier this month, the children began starting seeds indoors; already, a large number of them have begun germinating. Over Spring Break, we built seven raised beds and assembled a compost bin. I cannot wait to see the children carrying compost out to the bin!

One thing I have learned through past experience gardening in a Montessori environment, is that it is very important to retain some part of the garden as a plot of dirt. Digging, hoeing, raking, and shoveling are like all Practical Life activities, whereas, an adult hoes to rid the plot of weeds and aerate the soil, the child hoes because she finds it fulfilling (because the child is in the process of constructing him or herself). Montessori realized this during her observations of children in which she noticed them doing seemingly pointless activities like repetitively cleaning a table that was already spotless. As a result, if you don't begin your garden by setting aside a designated spot for digging, you will either find your vegetables being dug up (or weeded) by errant gardeners, or you will spend the entire summer chasing children out of the garden (obviously, not the intended result).

We also built a small tool shed to house the children's gardening tools.

Finally, I enlisted the help of my talented assistant Katie, who willingly spent some of her Spring Break creating these hand-painted signs for the garden.

For more information about the importance of nature to children, see Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv; for more information about the importance of experiential gardening to nutritional education, please see Raising an Adventurous Eater: Ideas and Inspiration from the Edible Schoolyard.

Plans for the Vegetable Garden

Whether it means carrying hyacinths around the classroom and sharing their delicate fragrance with your friends or spending the weekend pouring through seed catalogues, we all find ourselves dreaming of Spring.

This weekend, we formalized plans for our edible classroom, the Bloom! Potager. In March, the children will begin starting seeds indoors to transplant once the danger of frost has finally passed. Our goal is to give the children a better understanding of the natural world (botany, the life cycle of plants, a garden ecosystem, composting/decomposition), encourage children to eat a healthy diet rich in fruits and vegetables, create meaningful experiences between children and food, and expose them to the pleasures of gardening.

We selected diverse vegetables that we thought the children would really enjoy- including a lot of vegetables with really vibrant colors, foods that could be included in traditional Montessori food preparation exercises, and small vegetables (baby carrots, grape tomatoes, miniature varieties of peppers, cucumbers, and beets), that would be perfect for an individual snack!

The gardens will be grown without the use of any synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. The seeds we will use are primarily organic, heirloom varieties that we purchased from Seed Savers Exchange, a lovely non-profit in Iowa that is devoted to increasing genetic biodiversity in the food system by helping to save the world's diverse, but endangered, garden heritage from homogenization by seed conglomerates. They operate the largest non-governmental seed bank in the United States where they permanently maintain thousands of rare and unique vegetable varieties from around the world- more than 25,000 endangered vegetable varieties! Most of the seeds were hand carried to North America by immigrants and passed along to their ancestors.

Who knows, maybe Maria Montessori had some of the same varieties in her own garden!

For more information about Seed Saver's Exchange, please visit their website at:

http://www.seedsavers.org/

Here's what the children will be growing in the Bloom! Gardens this Spring:

"Green" Beans:

-Climbing French: Classic green beans! The most widely grown climbing French bean in the 1930's

-Pencil Pod Golden Wax Beans: An beautiful translucent stringless bean, introduced in 1900

-Red Swan: A stabilized cross between a purple snap bean and a pinto bean! Dusty red rose colored!

-Sultan's Golden Crescent: A beautiful, curly, translucent, stringless bean that is almost extinct.

We can't wait to see the children picking green beans for snack! Hopefully, the vibrant colors will entice even the most reluctant eaters!

Other Beans:

-Hidatsa Shield Figure: There are Slow Foods Arc of Taste beans raised by the Hidasta Indians

-Tiger's Eye: These hail from Chile or Argentina, beautiful mottled appearance

We foresee lots of bean shelling!

Beets:

-Cylindra: Tiny carrot shaped beets that resemble red carrots. Sweet, easy to peel, perfect for snack time!

-Chioggia: Beautiful red and white concentric rings. Came from Italy in the 1840's

Carrots:

-Dragon: Tiny, refined purple carrots! Does that sound like a great snack food or what?

-Paris Market: Really tiny, red-orange carrots.

-Scarlet Nantes: Yummy baby carrots!

Cucumbers:

-Crystal Apples: Apple shaped cucumbers from New Zealand. Great for fresh eating at snack time with dip!

-Parisian Pickling: Known in Europe as Improved Bourbonne, used for making cornichons and gherkins!

We are sure the children would love doing some pickling activities!

Melons:

-Delice de la Table: French heirloom from 1885- almost extinct, very sweet, translates as "delight of the table"

-Prescott Fond Blanc: French melon from 1850- beautiful warted skin and an incredible fragrance when ripe

Melon balling activities!

Onions:

-Borettana: Italian cipollini heirlooms! Great for pickling and kabobs!

Peas:

-Dwarf Gray Sugars: Introduced in 1892- stringless, beautiful purple blossoms!

-Green Arrow: Standard English peas!

We know the children will love wandering through the garden picking the prolific sugar snap peas, and shelling proper English peas!

Peppers:

-Buran: Sweet, bright red, glossy, Polish heirloom, bell peppers

-Joe's Round: Originally from Italy, brought to the US by the Sesito family of NY. Sweet 3/4" round peppers (almost like a grape tomato)- perfect for snack time!

Squash:

-Galeux d' Eysines: Introduced in France in 1996- sweet, moist, and covered with beautiful warts

-Long Island Cheese: East Coast heirloom remembered for great squash pie!

-Pumpkins: Duh!

Radishes:

-Early Scarlet Globe- Beautiful, bright red radishes!

-French Breakfast: Oblong and blunt, rose scarlet with a white tip (like a beautiful carrot!). Perfect for snack!

Tomato:

-Currant Sweet Pea: Very prolific! Excellent clean tomato flavor!

-Italian Heirloom: Beautiful heirlooms from Italy. Easy to peel, great for canning!

Watermelon:

-Golden Midget: Golden yellow plants and fruit with very sweet salmon flesh

-Moon and Stars: Oval fruits covered with bright yellow stars and one large moon.

The children will also be growing a small herb garden and a garden with some heirloom flowers (including a large number chosen to attract butterflies- which the children will be hatching!).

We can't wat to see the children wandering through the gardens, stuffing their mouths with fresh vegetables that they grew themselves!