Garden Unit: Day 8 Garden Maintenance

Maintenance

            Gardening can require a lot of maintenance work.  The most basic need is ensuring the plants are getting enough water, nutrients, and sunlight.  However, there is also other maintenance work that needs to be done for a great quality home garden.

When we were viewing the grapes, we noticed a lot of dead branches that needed to be cut away.  There were still some healthy branches sprouting green leaves and buds so it still gave us hope for the grapes.  We decided to trim the dead branches with garden clippers.  Trimming and cutting away unwanted dead branches allows the plants to grow more.  This is something you should be doing throughout your gardening experience.  We also looked for weeds to pull out of the ground as this can take away the water from our vegetables.  This took quite a bit of work and I was a little surprised on how well my son handled it.  He used garden clippers properly and he was very careful not to hurt the plant. 

We then wanted to test the soil of the grapes since we did not do this yet.   The soil seemed to be fine. We also wanted to test the water/moisture levels to see if it was getting enough water from the drip system that was already in place.  It did indicate that our grapes were not receiving enough water, so we increased the timer on our drip system.   

             For today’s activity, I wanted my son to create a garden to-do chart.  This will be something he will do after his lessons for the day.  I wanted him to have a set of days and time to water the plants and do any other maintenance work.  This will make him feel responsible for his garden as well as remind him of all the hard work he is doing.  I created a weekly to-do chart and my son got to choose when he wanted to water the plants.  He also wanted to check the levels of the soil and moisture every two weeks so he wrote that in as well.  The basics of my son’s weekly chart is:

Sunday: Soil Test every two weeks

Monday: Water the carrots and bell peppers, check on the grapes

Tuesday: Trim dead branches and trim excess leaves

Wednesday: Check the moisture readings every two weeks

Thursday: Pull Weeds and spread mulch to avoid more weeds from sprouting

Friday:  Water the carrots and bell peppers, check on the grapes (if needed)

Saturday: Day Off

I attached a weekly chart that we used for this activity, for your personal uses.  My son also wanted to decorate his chart by adding stickers and drawing some more vegetables and fruits.  There is space on our weekly chart to do that if your child is interested.  We placed his chart on his door to his room.

We also wrote in an estimated date on our home yearly calendar of when the carrots, grapes, and bell peppers could be harvested for eating. They are not ready to be harvested as of yet, but I cannot wait until we get to this point.

Link to Chart:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0By0QNYgSFLFKN0dyczZxYmZfUDA