First day at farm school, Fall 2014

This week we had our first day at Farm School through the Educulture Project. We met our new farm teachers, Teacher Leslee and Teacher Spring.

We took a tour of the farm. Everything on the farm has a purpose. These flowers are to bring in the pollinators to help the plants grow.

Some of the flowers are edible. We tasted the borage.

Look! There are feathers on the ground! We learned that the turkeys used to be in this spot. That's why there are feathers on the ground. Also, there is not as much green grass because the turkeys dig in the grass and dirt to find bugs to eat.

We walked slowly and quietly up to the turkeys so we wouldn't scare them.

They were big! The boy turkeys have blue faces. These turkeys will be on someone's table for Thanksgiving.

Farm Teacher Spring taught us about the pumpkins.

We found all of the parts of the pumpkins: the vine, a leaf, some flowers, a small green pumpkin, and an orange pumpkin.

There were red Cinderella pumpkins, sugar pumpkins, and Jack-Be-Little pumpkins. We each picked out a sugar pumpkin to harvest. We will cook some in school, and the rest we will take to Helpline House to share with our neighbors.

Farmer Brian and the farm interns built this awesome bean tunnel. It had scarlet runner beans and cucumbers growing on it. It started out big at one end,

and ended up small at the other end.

The tunnel led to a sunflower house where we had snack and wrote in our Nature Journals. It was orange day, and we wore orange and ate an orange whole food snack: carrots and oranges.

Wow! Just look at this sunflower!

We all got "bean badges" for going through the tunnel (made from bean leaves that stuck to our clothes).

In one greenhouse there were lots of different things drying.

Look at this cool gourd!

These beans were drying. The seeds inside are purple.

These flowers are drying so that the seeds can be collected. The the flowers will be used to make natural dyes.

Farm Teacher Leslee, who is also a restaurant owner and chef, cooked up some sugar pumpkin with sugar and cinnamon. It was yummy!

When we went home we all got a flower to take with us.

Here are the pumpkins we harvested from the farm, waiting for more learning in the preschool classroom.