Planting an Autumn Garden in Kitah Bet

We are so excited it’s autumn! We’ve been following the aspect of Reggio wisdom that calls nature the third teacher, and letting the season guide us both inside the classroom and outdoors. During our morning outside play time we’ve been working hard on our autumn/winter garden. After reading Peter Rabbit and learning through the grapevine about something called a Peter Rabbit Garden, Morah Adi brought us seeds from her local library to plant with our very own hands here at IJP. 

First, friends prepared the beds for our garden. We ripped out any drooping remnants of the garden KG/KD grew last spring, and amended the dirt with fresh soil and compost! We used shovels to mix the fresh dirt in, and some of us used our hands! 

Some of our friends in KB are super into finding and “saving” earthworms on the playground, so we took the opportunity to tell them how important and friendly worms are for our soil and gardens! You can see Benji, Elijah, and Nathan returning a worm to the garden so that it can help us make more healthy soil! 

 

After the beds were ready, we spent a lot of time looking at each of the kinds of seeds Morah Adi got for us! Morah Lindsey gave each friend a chance to look at the seeds, hold them, and smell them. We talked about how each of the kinds of seeds looked different. Then we added all the seeds to a little pail of sand, mixed them together, and sprinkled the mix over the soil!

After we planted our vegetables, we wanted to plant flowers too! We decided to plant two kinds of poppies- California poppies and Flanders poppies- so that we will have flowers in the spring.

After only a week we noticed some of the seeds are already starting to sprout.

We can’t wait to see what comes next. Adi and I have been reading Lorie Hammond’s book,

Growing Whole Children In the Garden, and something she wrote really stuck with us:

“A connection to nature is not primarily an intellectual understanding. It is an emotional and, in many ways, a spiritual matter, which can be gained through authentic and simple experiences.” We hope that these experiences, watching a garden grow through the coldest months, will fuel the already natural predilection so many of our friends have toward caring for the earth."