Summer Garden Gathering : 4

The milkweed plants are fascinating. They developed seed pods that have been covered in little yellow bugs for weeks (yellow from the pollen?. . . aphids?). Yesterday, the first "new" thing I noticed about the garden was that the pods have started opening to reveal their feathery seeds. These feathers will work with the wind as transportation to carry the seeds to new places. Here is some information about milkweed seed propagation.

Mrs. Morgan brought some books and ideas to share with us. One of her favorite artists is Claude Monet who liked to paint gardens. You can learn more about him here. She also brought a calendar and showed us how she plans to record small amounts of information about the garden directly on her calendar in the squares for each day of the month. This is a good strategy to encourage observation and writing for people who may be intimidated or not have the time for writing longer journal-type entries, but it will also help us to remember important things we noticed about the garden's development. I could imagine that her calendar entry for yesterday might read, "we planted bean seeds that we harvested from a dried bean pod around our growing corn."

The photo above shows the color changes of these foot-long beans as they dry. The bean pod at the left was too dried up to eat, so we took the beans out to dry them. At first, they are light pink, but as they dry, they gradually turn to a deep purple-red to black. In this intense heat, we had beans drying at various stages. The black beans on the right are the are the beans we planted around our corn.

We watered, harvested cabbage and beans, pruned the basil and coleus, fed the turtles our discarded cabbage leaves and bean pods (which they began eating almost immediately), shared some books, marveled at the milkweed and corn growth, wished for the tomatoes to turn red, planted a squash seedling and watermelon plant started from seed, and planted some zinnia seeds, a pumpkin seed, and some lettuce-leaf basil in pots. We also planted some beans that were not dry and some dry beans to experiment and see if both will germinate or not. We predict that the dry beans will germinate but the wet ones will not.

Below is a slide show of my photos from the morning. We were a small crowd with only Mrs. Morgan, my son, and myself at first. Another family joined us later in the morning. Some of us started work at 8:30 am, and we didn't leave until 10:30 am! Working in the morning was definitely the way to go. In this heat wave, we could not have worked for nearly as long at noon.