Truro Public Library

87°, hot, sunny and breezy today and Anna, Ella, Carolina, Isabel, Alyssa, Diana, Safiya, Madison and Gigi recorded the day’s activities:

We picked and took home: potatoes, nasturtiums, beans (purple & green), basil, rosemary.

We tasted: our first lemon cucumbers of the year.

Looked at: sunflowers.

Sorted: potatoes by size.

A hot sunny 87° day says third grader Diana and sixth grader Gayle.
After watering and harvesting summer squash and lemon cucumbers, the kids helped chop vegetables and fruit for some yummy juice. Anna brought her juicer and then everyone got to choose what to put in the first one:
Juice #1 (Sunset Drink): apple, lemon cucumber, grapefruit, carrot, broccoli, squash, lime.
Juice #2 (Green Drink): green apples, broccoli, spinach and cucumber.

Today’s observers, fifth grader Madison and sixth grader Gayle, wrote down that the weather was a sunny, warm 73° with a breeze.

One group tied colored yarn on 10 (out of 33) of the sunflower plants and then measured how tall they’ve grown: yellow – 46″, light blue – 45″, green – 47″, baby blue – 45″, light pink – 42″, red – 48″, orange – 48″, lavender – 40″, beige – “34” and fuchsia – 46″.

The other group watered the thirsty plants, making many trips to refill their watering cans.

Then it was time to harvest and eat basil, mint, lemon cucumbers, purple beans, green beans and lots of lettuce. Liam even lost a front tooth while biting into a cucumber!

Soon to be fifth grader, Madison and soon to be second grader, Azalea recorded a sunny, hot 79°.

Jill found a monarch caterpillar in the carrot leaves. Each child got a close-up look and we decided to keep him/her in a jar with lots of Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota) in the children’s room of the library as a garden pet, until a butterfly emerges.

We picked and ate lemon cucumbers, squash, lettuce, beans and basil – what a feast! We learned it’s difficult to weed around the squash since they have lots of prickers and we watered all the plants.

Today Anna and the kids played a new game of tag, called Vegetable Tag (similar to T.V. Tag) and everyone came up with the lots of vegetable names so they wouldn’t be out!

From Sustainable CAPE – Center for Agricultural Preservation & Education on Facebook:

“We all know vegetables love sunshine and water, but did you know they need good nutrition, just like us? Today in the Children’s Garden we dug our hands into some organic soil booster, which we learned contains delicious (to the plants!) manure, peat, humus, seaweed, worm castings, lobster shells and even beneficial bacteria called mycorrhizae. How do the plants eat? “With their roots!”, said Audrey, age 6.

Healthy soil means healthy plants– and healthy kids! Yum!”

Starting today, we changed our meeting time from Thursdays to Wednesdays from 3-4pm!

Amore (Anna’s dog) received lots of love on an 86°, sunny, hot and humid day. We learned all about weeds with Wendy Willard who brought many tools that she sometimes uses to remove stubborn weeds which included: trowels, weeding forks, bulb planters, “stubborn weed remover” (like a screw driver with a kink in it), scissors, clippers, a small brown bucket and one gardening glove for each child to use. Wendy also works at pruning the library grounds and she brought her pruning saw.

Next we headed over to some blueberry bushes near the garden that aren’t producing as many blueberries this year because of all the weeds around them. The children learned how to pull a weed that they may want to save, such as the many small oak plants that many of them took home. Wendy explained the difference between a tap root (looks almost like a carrot) and a fibrous root (looks hairy).

Lastly, we carried trash bags, rakes, hoes and rocks to the front of the library where there was a big patch of grass coming through the mulch. Wendy asked the kids what might happen to the grass if it was covered with the black plastic bags and they predicted that the grass would melt and die. We’ll find out next week.

Thank you Wendy!