It was a chilly day in our garden.  We continue to keep it clean by picking up falling leaves. Today, we have added more vegetables to our garden.  This time it is radish seeds that we planted.  We hope the rains continue to help water our plants while we are on winter break.  Let's hope that the pest that is eating our lettuce and pea plants goes away and that we see a lot of progress in our garden when we return.

We have been rooting Milk Weed by taking cuttings from the Milk Weed plants in our garden.  Milk Weed is a favorite food of the Monarch Butterfly.  We placed the Milk Weed cuttings in water until they grew roots.  We then planted them.  We each got to take one home and plant them.  The more Milk Weed plants for the Monarch caterpillar to eat the more Monarch Butterflies.  We need to help the Monarch Butterfly survive.

We planted carrot seeds in our garden.  We learned that carrots can come in colors other than orange.  We are looking forward to harvesting them and seeing what colors we get.  We also got to snack on some baby carrots. Carrots are a yummy snack to help fuel us while we work in our garden.

We were quizzed on what we would add to a fruit salad.  We learned that tomatoes, cucumbers, avocados, bell peppers, squash, pumpkins, and olives are fruit.  The are the fruit of the plant that that grows around the seeds to protect and nourish the seeds.  Vegetables are the roots, stem, leaves, bulbs, tubers, and unopened flowers that we eat.  Today we added Sugar Snap Peas and Yellow Onions to our garden.

We learned about some garden pests that may cause our plants to not growi as we wish such as aphids, cut worms, ants, and grasshoppers.  We also learned about beneficial ones such as worms, butterflies, and bees.  Plus there are some that are in between good and bad such as the Milk Weed beetle that helps keep the weed from getting out of hand and the caterpillar, such as the Monarch, that eats the Milk Weed leaves in order to become butterflies.  We then went all around our garden to see what we could find.

With the weather still warm but the hope of cooler weather to come soon, we planted some lettuce and chard. We learned how to not plant to low or too high. 

Students worked hard today to clean out debris from the garden plots and add more garden soil. The soil was donated by Kellogg and has been a great resource for our garden.  We have been able to add some additional garden plots using garden frames donated from Mr. List of Sylmar High School.

Today we learned some fun facts about onions.  We learned that onions are bulbs, 95% water,  you can eat both the onion tops and the bulb, pilgrims brought them to North America, and more.  Last school year, onions were planted in one of the garden plots.  Today we got to harvest them.  There were about 12.  We raffled the onions off since there were not enough onions for everyone to take them home.

We also worked at removing weeds from our Butterfly Garden and Hope Garden.  We enjoy seeing butterflies visit our garden.

A few students assisted parent volunteer, Mr. Rios, build garden plots.  These new garden plots will give our students more places to plant.

To prepare for our winter garden, we added some new soil to our plots.

Last year students in Room 29 planted carrots.  These carrots grew and grew and grew.  This year's students in Room 29 got to dig them up.  Thank you to the mom who volunteered and took them home and cleaned them up before the class got eat them.