Youth Garden Education, Summer 2024
Spade Studio ($5/child/session)
10:00-11:15 am each day. Focus group is ages 6-10, older kids welcome. All sessions will take place outdoors weather permitting.
Each studio session will include some time in the garden, reading a book together on a garden topic, a simple lesson or experiment, and some garden art to take home. For ages 6-10.
JUNE 13-GARDEN GLOVES
Seeds are beautiful and come in many colors, shapes, and sizes. We will dissect seeds to find out what’s inside, plant a garden in a glove to learn about germination, and create some seed art.
JULY 11: PLANT PAINTING
There is a rainbow of vegetables growing in our garden! We will look for all the colors and learn how each pigment provides different nutritional value to our diet. These vegetable pigments will be used to make some artwork with natural dyes/paints.
JULY 25: FLOWER FUN
It’s the flower that makes the seeds. We will walk through this life cycle of a plant from seed to seed as we explore the different flowers in the garden. Each child will make some flower petal art and arrange a pretty bouquet of flowers to take home.
Garden Stories (Free)
June 6+20, July 18 from 10:00-10:45
Ages 2-5 with an adult! Siblings welcome.
Come listen to a story under the shade trees by the garden. We will also incorporate games, songs, and garden art to take home.
Meet Wendy! She lives at The Saltbox and will be heading up our youth summer classes. Wendy has decades of experience in the garden from when she was a little girl helping grow vegetables on the farm to gardening for her own family and even helping Seth put together market baskets for the 4-H fair! Although no longer teaching in the classroom, Wendy is a teacher by trade and still uses this gift whenever the opportunity arises. With her creativity in the mix, learning is always fun!
Our garden is a place where we inhale the fresh beauty all around as we continually learn and grow. We carry out familiar routines and try new things too. In the garden we observe the tiniest of details as we partake in God’s grand design of food grown for human nourishment. It’s a special place to us, and we love to share this space with others who are either interested in just seeing how our vegetables are grown or getting in the dirt and taking in the joy of picking a fresh tomato off the vine.
We especially love to see kids exploring in the garden. Last summer our young daughter spent countless hours toddling behind us, picking produce straight off the vine, and munching on it as we worked. In these days of supermarket shopping, it can be easy to disconnect how food is grown- especially for kids who may be generations removed from a home garden- and we want as many kids as possible to have the opportunity to connect to the growing process.