Story Telling in the Garden

This week the Calgary Public Library visited us at the garden! At Hillhurst-Sunnyside Larissa Johnston from the Louise Riley branch came and read us lots of fun books. We learned about how friends can help us when we're scared. We also read a book where vegetables were made into cars, planes, skis and much more.

We took a break with our snack of apples and mangos (which were a bit hit!). After our snack we created our own stories. We passed around pictures that could inspire our stories - like Jo the Ladybug and Sally the Chickadee. After we made up stories of our own we worked together to create a story together! Each person would take a turn adding a sentence or two to the story. 

That was a lot of sitting down so we played some tag to get up and running. We played octopus tag - where we had to join arms and run together to catch everyone. We also played tree tag where whoever is tagged freezes and can only be unfrozen if their friend helps them. All of these activities helped us realize that we are most successful when we work together and have our friends or family to help us. 

Over at Silver Springs Edible Garden Courtney Novotny joined us from the Crowfoot library. We read some more stories and sang a song about peas in a pod. We also had time to draw what we found in our garden. Our chard, kale, potatoes, pumpkins and peas are growing really well! We even tried some of the kale and peas (in addition to our snack of apples and mango).

We wanted to run around a bit after that so we played Tree Tag and a variation of it called Banana Tag (in this game it takes two people to unfreeze frozen individuals). All that running tired us out so we played Tangled Tree Roots. In this game we all stood in a circle and held hands with someone who wasn't standing next to us. This meant we were all tangled and we needed to work together to untangle ourselves! Again, this showed us that we can achieve more when we work together. 

Don't worry if you missed our activities this week - you can always come next week. 

Hillhurst Sunnyside Community Garden/ Orchard
10am-12pm
OR
Silver Springs Edible Garden
2pm-4pm

What to Bring: Water, sunscreen and your enthusiasm for gardening!

Berry-Painting and a little bit of Yoga

We had two activities through which the kids were able to channel their talents today! Both were intimately tied to the nature we are a part of and cannot do without and served as a reminder as to how important it is for us to be conscious of this relation!

Firstly, some art, and for a change, instead of using another chemical-based tube-stored paint, we opted to create our own - using berries!

Mushing together some raspberries, we were able to obtain a nice bright red, while a little more counter-intuitively, blueberries gave us a deeper red with a heavier tone. A modest palette but enough to splatter around the page to interesting effect. The 'paint' also had a nice consistency to it which allowed us to stick pieces of bark and other plant material to our page to create a nice collage of sorts.

Naturally, as often happens in any great artistic endeavor, the journey can get a little messy, and there was definitely a little bit of running back and forth to the tap to wash our hands but in the end, a common theme in the sharing circle was that the kids definitely enjoyed their little moment of expressing themselves through the medium of fruit-mush-on-paper!

My personal favorite  of the day though was a little bit of improvisational yoga in the garden! In the absence of a proper yoga-teacher, we decided to use a little gem of a book called the yoga game to see if we could solve a riddle given to us and then interpreting the response in a yoga pose! We had the tree (vrksasana), the cat (svanasana, marjariasana, bitilasana... all combined into the one animal!), and also the cobra (bhujangasana)! A little revelation for me was that I could pull off the headstand after-all (at our Silver Springs location with a little help from a friend :) ). Again, a great day to be out among the green with the only unexpected weather outcome being a little grass-shower from all the kids at the end of the Sunnyside session - awesome!

"The Cobra" - could you tell?

Crouching tiger...resetting before another star jump!

To the dust all shall return!

The theme for the day was composting and naturally we had quite a few composting-related activities that occupied us this week!

At the Sunnyside location, we began by inspecting our plot and making sure our crops were healthy and green. We spent a good portion of our time ensuring we didn’t have too many weeds competing with our plantation, and with the occasion, I also got a chance to finally learn all the different greens we had growing. Calgary’s been rather dry and warm these past few weeks so we made sure we generously watered our plot as well.

For the activities, we began first of all by learning the essentials of composting by reading through this beautiful picture book and then to test our knowledge we played compost-or-not classifying game. But first, we had to go on a little treasure hunt to find all the ‘item-cards’ listing some things we could find in our garden before deciding if we’d throw them into our compost bin. Naturally, when things are hidden, sometimes they stay a little too well hidden so we were faced with a frantic all-hands-on-deck period when we all tried to hunt down the final card, but luckily they were all found in the end!

We had some obvious ones such as apple cores and other organic food items which are, of course, definitely compostable. We also had not-so-obvious ones such as t-shirts and clothing items of which only the cotton bits or other organic fibres are compostable.

Finally, we had a chance to make our own little compost starter cups which we made by first grabbing a scoop of the ready to use compost from the garden – the ‘brown’. Our snack for the day was everyone’s favourite fruit – bananas! – so we were able to use the chopped-up peels as the ‘green’. The trick to getting the compost going is to layer the greens and the browns and making sure to keep the mixture nice and moist with a nice sponge-cake-like consistency. My apologies if the next time you go to enjoy your sponge-cake with some tea, you are reminded of a garden compost, although, that’s not altogether a bad result either if it gets us maintaining our own composts at home :)

These activities we were able to replicate pretty smoothly over at over Silver Springs location, but with the added bonus that we had time for some games at the end – nothing rounds out a nice, warm afternoon better than a few rounds of ‘what-time-is-it-Mr/Ms/Mrs/Queen/King-Wolf’!

Can you hear what I hear?

Birds seem to be abundant in the city of Calgary but we tend to overlook and become oblivious towards the common group of pigeons that hover over a green field in the summer or the crow that caws at you on your daily commute to work. What role do these birds play in our community, the greater ecosystem and more specifically our garden?

These are a few of the questions we began to explore at our Kids Grow event on Saturday, July 5th. We began by familiarizing ourselves with the common birds of Calgary. Many people are familiar with the Mallards and Geese that inhabit the surrounding bodies of water and the crows and pigeons that socialize in public areas but how much do we know about the starlings and sparrows? After our information session conducted through a fun game of matching bird pictures with their corresponding facts and bird calls, we took a nature walk to see what birds we could find. Our hearing skills were surely heightened on this adventure as we had to find the proprietors of each distinct sound amongst the harmonious bird chatter.

After our nature walk, we headed back to the garden to make some bird feeders. Many varieties of bird seed that can be bought at your local grocery stores contain preservatives and other not-so-nice things that can harm our wildlife. We decided to make our own using goodies that are safe for birds and completely edible for humans. Another problem highlighted with bird feeders is the sheer dependence birds can develop to an man-made source of food. The bigger your bird feeder and the more you refill it, the greater the chances are that birds in your area will keep coming back for more and develop a reliance on your goods. Ensure that your feeder is small and contains a variety of seeds and dried fruits that can be supplementary to their diet and not fully meet their dietary requirements. We made bird feeders out of orange peels! Click here for the instructions.

Succeeding our bird feeder construction were some fun bird-themed games! We began with the 'Duck Waddle' and finished with 'The Little Lost Birdie' in which parents and children paired up, one as the mama bird and one as the blindfolded baby bird. The mama bird would announce her specific bird call to the baby and the little birdie would have to use her listening skills to find her mama bird!

To learn more about birds in Calgary, check out the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary. The walking trails are unfortunately closed due to the flood damage from last year but they continue to offer information through their nature and free tours to those interested.

From Seed To Fruit

The forecasts had been ominous but in the end, Calgary was able to offer us another fine day to spend outside, and what better way to enjoy it than working the land again!

Looking for ladybugs!

Today’s activities centred on exploring the plant life cycle. After some very productive work de-weeding the orchard, the kids at the Sunnyside location were also quite adept at piecing together the whole narrative from the seed to the plant which flowers before finally bearing the fruit containing the seeds to start it all over again. It’s definitely a process that we overlook too often, yet it never ceases to amaze us when we contemplate how all the potentialities of a plant are contained in the seed – life’s original ‘miracle,’ that sustains all other life on this planet!

We also read a little story together that visualized this idea beautifully by illustrating the diversity of flowers and fruits carried on this Earth (who doesn’t love children’s books?!) and the kids were definitely recognizing a lot more of the plants than I was! Naturally, we finished off with a little game, this time we played magic plants. Again, I portrayed the poor farmer who has to ward away trespassers on his field who evade his attentions by ‘freezing’ into plants just when he turns around… a wonderful way to round off the fun!

Over to the Silver Springs garden, and from the close-knit village-feel of Sunnyside, we found ourselves in the wide expanses, and swooping mountain vistas of the north-western part of the city. Our plants were definitely sprouting and garden had itself a newly-crafted seating area as well. The kids harnessed their artistic talents in composing some really creative pictures that incorporated actual plant-material with colourful additions of their own which all melded nicely together on the page, I have to say! Check out this great composition from Lucian!