Kids Can Grow Project Notes
Our 4-H club is doing a new project - for our county - and we're madly scrambling to get it started. We've been meeting monthly but as of May we'll change that to weekly. All of our children will be learning about gardening. Each child will have their own 4x4 (or 3x5) bed at home to tend. We will also have four community beds at our county extension office. Each of the children have been split up in to four teams and have already met to decide what they will be planting. Over the course of the summer they will tend these beds and we'll be heading to the local Farmer's Market 2-3 times to sell the produce. All the money raised will go back in to the KGC program.
Today we had our second meeting. The kids planted (very late, I know!) seeds that need a bit of a head start. These will have to go in the ground in the next 2-3 weeks so hopefully they will grow fast! If not, we'll have to look at getting seedlings or just doing plants from seeds this year.
Once all of this was cleaned up, we headed in for our potluck dinner.
We also watched a fascinating video on square foot gardening. I mistakenly thought this was just a raised bed. It's not! This is the method we will be having our children use. It's really quite neat! You can see more about it here if you wish.
It's been wonderful as we had estimated that we would need about $300 per child for this project. We have either raised money through fundraisers or (most!!) of the materials have been donated! It's really been wonderful to see how the community has stepped up to help out this kiddos. We'll definitely be posting photos of our project over the coming months.
And if you have a local 4-H program, I highly recommend it. One thing I love - all three of my boys can do this together. It makes it so much easier than running them around to various age-segregated activities. The older kids in the club help the younger ones. It's been a wonderful blessing over the last year to be part of this group.
We were at the meeting from 4pm to 6:30pm.
