Whether it means carrying hyacinths around the classroom and sharing their delicate fragrance with your friends or spending the weekend pouring through seed catalogues, we all find ourselves dreaming of Spring.
This weekend, we formalized plans for our edible classroom, the Bloom! Potager. In March, the children will begin starting seeds indoors to transplant once the danger of frost has finally passed. Our goal is to give the children a better understanding of the natural world (botany, the life cycle of plants, a garden ecosystem, composting/decomposition), encourage children to eat a healthy diet rich in fruits and vegetables, create meaningful experiences between children and food, and expose them to the pleasures of gardening.
We selected diverse vegetables that we thought the children would really enjoy- including a lot of vegetables with really vibrant colors, foods that could be included in traditional Montessori food preparation exercises, and small vegetables (baby carrots, grape tomatoes, miniature varieties of peppers, cucumbers, and beets), that would be perfect for an individual snack!
The gardens will be grown without the use of any synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. The seeds we will use are primarily organic, heirloom varieties that we purchased from Seed Savers Exchange, a lovely non-profit in Iowa that is devoted to increasing genetic biodiversity in the food system by helping to save the world's diverse, but endangered, garden heritage from homogenization by seed conglomerates. They operate the largest non-governmental seed bank in the United States where they permanently maintain thousands of rare and unique vegetable varieties from around the world- more than 25,000 endangered vegetable varieties! Most of the seeds were hand carried to North America by immigrants and passed along to their ancestors.
Who knows, maybe Maria Montessori had some of the same varieties in her own garden!