The largest part of the beginning of my internship has been the School Garden Project. We have been successful with kids coming Wednesdays and Fridays to enjoy the gardening experience. Throughout the hour and a half that we get to spend with the kids they begin with weeding and watering and learning the importance of garden care. After the chores are completed we get to have a lesson, like learning about pollination, and do a craft and game that are related. For the pollination lesson we played musical flowers, and we made a butterfly craft to resemble one of the various pollinators we learned about. In the picture below the kids are flying the butterflies they decorated around to “pollinate the flowers”.
On another school garden day we talked about different kinds of gardens. Our craft that day was for each group to draw their own community Garden, seen in the next picture. This introduced the idea of sharing a garden space. One of my other projects will be the Atwood Community Garden. I was slightly concerned at the beginning of my internship because we did not have a set location. We are excited to finally have a garden lot secured. The plan is to have ten raised beds put in and ready for a late summer or early fall growing season. We are partnering with the high school FFA, the Atwood extension office, Atwood Chamber of Commerce, and have received gracious funding from a few other groups and people.