Planning a butterfly garden Winter is a great time for garden planning. Butterfly gardens combine nectar plants and host plants. Nectar plants Flowering nectar plants feed butterflies and many other pollinators. Your garden will be liveliest if you plant a variety of nectar plants that flower in abundance at different times of the year. We…
Butterflies abounding!
Butterfly season is underway! Kindergarten, First, Third and Fourth grade classes have been raising caterpillars from our gardens and learning about their amazing lives. Second graders will get their caterpillars next week. PreK students and Fifth graders will start raising Luna Moths in mid-October. Ask your students what’s happening in their classrooms.
Butterflies!
Butterflies have been in short supply around North Carolina this summer, but activity is starting to pick up. The Sulphurs – medium-sized yellow butterflies – are especially active right now. Senna is the sulphur host plant. If you’re over at Shamrock, check out our senna plants for eggs. They look like tiny white footballs. Also…
We need your help this summer!
No one told the gardens that school is out! This is the most productive time of year, and we need people to come help us weed, water, and most importantly, EAT all of this wonderful food! Please sign up for a time to come to the garden. On the day of your choosing, you may…
Goodbye Mr. Marcus!
For the last two years, FoodCorps worker Marcus McFarland has devoted his boundless love and energy to our garden program, helping students plant, tend, harvest and cook while teaching them about their bodies and the remarkable natural world around them. We will miss you, Mr. Marcus, but we look forward to seeing what you accomplish…
With a little help from our friends…
We hosted a garden work day with the help from our neighbors at Garinger High School! They helped us build birdhouses, carry soil, and clean up after the cold winter. One of the biggest projects (definitely the heaviest), was moving the compost pile around the school to where it now sits by the playground. The…
Playing with pill bugs
While watering the garden one day, I had some third graders and some kindergarteners come up to me to help. As they were helping me weed, they saw some pill bugs and promptly screamed! This harmless bug is so common in the garden, that I wanted to show them that there is nothing to be…
Showing off our Chopping Chops!
So many sweet potatoes! We harvested so many sweet potatoes last year, and we were faced with the question; How can we feature this amazing veg in a way that our kids might not have seen before? We know that they can be made into fries, baked into chips, but let’s do something new and…