Yesterday we planted red leaf lettuce in one of the deck containers. Caya was very excited and quickly delved into helping dig holes and filling them back in. Kili, wanted to be involved, but mostly just stuck her hands in the dirt and tried to eat as much as possible. After finishing with the lettuce Caya said we should look for worms, so look for worms we did! We found many worms, larvae, and grubs in our backyard rain garden under the leaf litter. Caya didn't want to touch the "wiggly worms", but she was really interested in digging through the leaves and dirt to find them. Last night as I was tucking her into bed she had so many questions about the worms and bugs: "Why did they curl up when we touched them?", "What do they do?", "What do they eat?", "What eats them?" This led to a really great, 3-yr old level, ecological conversation about food webs and healthy soil. Day-1 was a gardening success!
Serviceberry Blossom April 16 Last fall we had the front of our house landscaped with plants all native to our region. There are several reasons I chose to stick with native plants - basically they enhance the environment by providing food/shelter to animals, particularly pollinators, using less water, not requiring fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides. Indiana Wildlife Federation and Indiana Native Plants and Wildflower Society are great sources for using native plants in landscaping for people in Indiana. Our yard is dominated by many large, old oak trees, so the landscaper we worked with wanted to keep with that theme and create type of woodland edge-habitat with the design. You will learn in any Ecology 101 course that edge-habitats are where the action takes place. Because they occur at the boundary between two habitats and provide a variety of heights in vegetation they support a high level of biodiversity. This is something that is easy ...
Great idea. Can you comment on how to keep dirt out of Kili's mouth while you garden?
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