So back in March, one of my
Sharing Saturday features was from
The Artful Child on investigating peas growing in your window with contact paper and a water paper towel. We tried this in Hazel's bedroom window. She now calls our pea plants elephant trunks. However it is neat to see the roots.
A great book to help see the plants and roots is
How Does a Seed Grow by Sue Kim. It has fold out pages and shows both the underground and above ground parts of the plant to grow different fruits--tomato, pepper, peas, oranges, blueberries, etc. Hazel of course loves it because of the fold out pages.
On the Monday after Easter we planted some seeds with my father. My parents are avid gardeners and grow amazing flowers and vegetables. We are going to bring some of our seeds to my parents to grow in their garden since they have better space and sun for gardening. However I promised Hazel we would try some gardening. The one thing I want to do is grow a sunflower garden for her to hide in. So sunflowers are on our list as well as watermelons, pumpkins, celery, carrots, zucchini and green beans oh and snap peas, of course.
By Friday we had some sunflowers already popping out. It was so exciting for Hazel to see. My father had cut two milk cartons in half for us and we used them to plant some of the seeds that would take the longest to harvest. Here are the seeds we planted.
We just filled the carton halves with soil and planted the seeds as deep as the package said. Then stuck them in nice sunny windows and watered them often.
We labeled the carton on the top part with what type of seeds we planted. We have one sunflower container, one pumpkin, one watermelon and one celery. Once they start growing we will replant them into cups and then eventually outside in our garden. We will also grow some carrots, marigolds, basil, zucchinis and tomatoes. Do you have a garden? What do you grow?
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| Sunflowers Day 9 |
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| Pumpkins Day 9 |
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| Watermelon Day 9 |
Since our sunflowers popped up first, we have started doing some sunflower crafts.I went to
DLTK's Crafts for Kids and found many sunflower crafts. All of these came from there.
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| Sunflower Mask |
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| Tissue Paper and Sunflower Seed Craft |
We also started the You Are My Sunshine Frames for Mother's Day gifts. Now I just need to get a good picture of my little sunshine. She is in her I hate pictures stage. She colored these with her dot markers and they remind me of the flowers in one of her favorite books (see below). We will share them when they are completely done as well.
We also read
How a Seed Grows Into a Sunflower by David Stewart, and one of our favorites is
My Garden by Kevin Henkes.
This is where I link up...
After having lunch outside, Steve went on to dig Hazel's sunflower garden. This garden will hopefully be a sunflower house this year for Hazel. Next year we may pick a different theme like a pizza garden. These ideas came from Sharon Lovejoy's Roots Shoots Buckets & Boots: Activities To Do in the Garden. For some of the other books we have been using as a reference check out this post.
