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’!