Planting Seeds & Moving Forward!

On Monday, July 30, we started to work in our garden.  We pulled out weeds so when we grew our plants the weeds wouldn't be there to look messy and ruin the garden. 

Before that meeting we had another one where we put seeds into plastic cups to take to our rooms so we could learn how to take care of plants.  We also plated seeds into small flower beds so we could have something to put in our garden when it's ready to grow.  The kind of plants we are growing are either healthy or a spice.  There are two kids of tomatoes, carrots, basil, cauliflower, and some others.  

The plants we took back to our rooms are growing quite well.  They are still small but it will take awhile for them to start sprouting.  This Thursday, my sister and I are going with Miss Allison to a college where they will show and talk to us about the Team Up Challenge. 

My sister and I can't wait for this trip!

By: Clea B. 

 

Silver Stars Game!

Last Friday we had so much fun attending the San Antonio Silver Stars Game!  We got to watch them beat the Atlanta Dream! 

AND we hosted a table at the game so that people could ask us questions about our project. It was so cool. 

Alicia even got to go on court and be introduced as our Haven for Hope rep! 

Our Field Trip to the Spurs Community Garden

What I learned on the field trip to the Spurs Community Garden:

Sara: Carrots grow under ground.  They need rain, soil and sun. Squash grows just like carrots they grow underground and rise up. Cauliflower grows like broccoli - you can either buy seeds or you can go to a plant nursery and dig a hole in the ground and put the plant in the ground and put the soil over the plant and then put a cage on it.

Amber: You need to eat vegetables & to plant a good garden. Vegetables are good for you.  You plant a good garden with soil & sun & water.  We want to make a good garden so we can have more vegetables to eat.  Today I ate a cherry tomato and a peach from the Spurs Garden. One thing I learned today that you have to plant a tomato plant 2 feet away from other plants.  You have to make sure that there are no caterpillars or worms eating your plants.

Clea & Joy:  We went to the San Antonio Food Bank and went to visit its garden.  We learned how to plant different things that will go into our garden.  We learned how to keep our garden alive and how to ward off the dangerous bugs.  We learned how to dig the dirt for our plants.  We then went to the Food Bank part and saw the warehouse where they sort and keep the food.  We learned how they send out the food to different places.  At the end we went home knowing how to maintain our garden and how Haven get's its food.

The Boys: Today we learned that growing plants is more than just watering them.  They need sun, nutrients, water and carbon dioxide and that you shuld not let it get damaged by bugs and animals and insects.
It takes gentle care and it takes some time and you just have to do what you need to do to let it grow.  And you need to take care of it like you are supposed to do. 

We also got to take a tour of the San Antonio Food Bank.  Here we are!

Thank you San Antonio Food Bank for teaching us about plants, gardening, and nutrition!

By Clea

By Clea:

For the next few weeks we will be learning how to plant and how to cook.  We will be going to the Community Garden to learn about plants and how to take care of the plants.  Later we will be going to a Silver Stars game to talk to people about what we are doing.  This Friday there will be a cooking class where they will teach us how to cook with the things we will plant.  At the end of this we should know how to plant garden, how to take care of a garden and responsibility.

Garden Designs

Last night we had a great mini-meeting.  We talked about our field trip next week (yay!) and drew pictures of our personal "perfect" garden.  Here are some of the great ideas we came up with!

Ethan would like his garden to look like his face (with fruits & vegetables!).

Moving forward we are most excited about:

Seeing the Silver Stars

Planting a garden

Doing something great for the community

Tonight!

From A:

We have a meeting tonight to discuss our field trip to the San Antonio Community Garden next week!  I am so excited!  The Spurs sponsored their garden which is so cool!

So far, so good

From Josiah, Age 12:

I think the last meeting went great! We are working on more volunteers and creative ideas.  The ideas we came up with our good like J. and A. said that we could spell out Haven For Hope Rocks with actual rocks, I thought that would be cool. My ideas were to grow weird, rarely known plants, veggies and fruits. But the tasty kinds though, like chickpeas for humus and couscous for stir fry. So people can see that were being creative and not growing boring food. If we do pick a common food like lettuce or cabbage then we should substitute for Rapunzel (a type of lettuce/cabbage). My other ideas were to put up signs with the picture of that type of vegetable, hand drawn, not printed from Google and like a description of it and stuff. And like get earthworms to help the growth of the food. And we could paint the concrete blocks/bricks so they don’t look so plain, jazz it up a bit! I can say so far, so good.