What's Growing in Waltham?

Last week, third graders at the Stanley Elementary School spent the morning digging, weeding, pruning, watering, and hauling mulch hay through the garden.  They worked very hard and they got a lot of work done, but soon they began to realize that their work was made easier by something that they had been studying in class: simple machines.  It turns out that a shovel is a combination of a level and a wedge, and that a wheelbarrow uses a wheel and axel, a level, and an inclined plane.  The hose and watering cans use screws to hold everything together, and a pair of scissors works by using two wedges attached at a fulcrum.  Each student had the opportunity to use all these different tools in the garden, and they seemed to be having a lot of fun, too.

Meanwhile, first graders at Northeast Elementary School planted pumpkin seeds in the brand-new pumpkin patch, and they are already starting to grow!  They found out from the book The Pumpkin Circle that it takes about 1oo days for pumpkins to grow, so by the time the first graders come back as second graders, there should be little green pumpkins ripening on the vines.

At McDevitt Middle School, there are four varieties of lettuce ready for harvesting: Salad Bowl, Merlot, Oak Leaf, and Romaine.  The sixth grade Cluster Challenge classes are going to spend this week harvesting them, so hopefully we’ll see them in a salad by the end of the week!

Young romaine lettuce growing at McDevitt

Yesterday was a great day for the garden at Northeast Elementary School!  Renee Lockwood’s class of enthusiastic gardeners thoroughly weeded the raised bed, carefully working around the young pea and carrot seedlings and the strawberry plants, to make room for the tomatoes and basil they were planting next!  Each student had the opportunity to dig holes for the seedlings with trowels and bury the young plants so that only their leaves were showing.  Then the seedlings were all watered with recycled gallon jugs.  With a dozen new tomato plants rooted in the rich compost, we are now looking forward to a bountiful harvest of delicious cherry tomatoes in the fall.

Meanwhile, look what we found in the compost!

What we found growing in the Northeast garden compost!

Can you see the old, rotten pumpkin in the background, and the dry, dusty seeds that spilled out?  But a few of those seeds did something different.  They sprouted!  Look carefully, those fat, green leaves growing on the fuzzy-looking stem are actually pumpkin seedlings!  Should we leave them alone to see if they grow pumpkins?

Spring is a great time to start a garden blog!  This is the season when you can really start to see the garden beginning to grow.  There are new green leaves on all the trees, there are flowers in bloom everywhere, and people are spending more time outdoors as the weather warms up.  But Spring is not really the beginning!  Much of what we can see growing around us now was started much earlier, sometimes during the Fall or Winter, and sometimes even longer ago than that.  Life in the garden is always a cycle,  and it’s impossible to pinpoint real beginnings.  Nature is always at work, and a good gardener works with Nature, understanding the natural rhythms and life cycles of the garden.  For the first post of the Waltham Gardens blog, I want to talk about what has been happening behind the scenes in the garden, through the seasons, leading up to what we see outside today…

The first flowers we saw this Spring grew from the bulbs planted in the Fall.  At the Stanley Elementary School, melting snow and ice gave way to the earliest flowers, delicate snowdrops and crocuses.  As the days grew sunnier and longer, we began to see daffodils and hyacinths, then tulips.

At McDevitt, the raspberry beds planted three years ago are flourishing in a way that would have been difficult to imagine when they began as bare twigs dug into the mud.  The bees are buzzing around the spring flowers, and after a tantalizing season of anticipaion, will see bunches of sweet fruits this year.

Kids at the Boys and Girls Club can hardly believe how the grape vines are growing along their back fence.  We can already see teeny-tiny bright green clusters on the vines.  Keep an eye on them… come Fall, the vines will be heavy with deep purple seedless grapes.

At Northeast Elementary School, we’re seeing lots of strawberries growing where just a few little seedlings were planted last year.  They slept, dormant, beneath a thick mulch of clean straw all winter, and now they’ve raised their delicate white flowers to meet the Spring pollinators so that we’ll have juicy berries in June.

Want to see for yourself?  All the gardens are accessible to the public.  Just be respectful and do not interfere with the hard work of our student gardeners!  Hope to see you in the garden soon!

~Nina

Judy Fallows points out growth on the grape vine at the Boys and Girls Club.