Hi, all… I’m scrambling a little to catch up this week as I’ve been away visiting my sister in Vermont. She is a gardener; we both love to put our hands (and feet!) in the dirt, and she was quite interested to hear that I’d be doing this e-course. My experiences gardening include having a great herb and flower garden at my previous house as well as participating some years ago at a community garden where I produced way more vegetables than my little family could possibly eat and therefore had to learn how to put up and put by. At my place of employment, a large Head Start program, I teach in a building with a lot of pre-school classrooms. A few teachers, including myself, have made several attempts to get some gardens going with the kids. One year it was a major success, but other years the gardens have failed miserably because most of the staff simply saw it as too much work. A real shame. Our program is divided between full day/full year classrooms and part day/seasonal classrooms; all of the teachers who love to garden unfortunately do not teach in the full year program, so we can get things started in the spring, but once we’re gone for the summer, it all falls apart. And did I mention the groundhogs???

At any rate, I’m hoping that I will gain some great new ideas here to help spark interest in creating some great new gardens and gardeners at school this year! We have a lot of new, young staff, so I’m hoping to inspire a few of them!!