Infant Program

June 2023

The children continue to be actively helping take care of our houseplants. Our ‘bean curtain’ (which is our indoor collection of Scarlet Runner pole beans), is growing very quickly! It’s amazing to see the changes on a daily basis, and the children are beginning to notice the new leaves! Imagine their excitement when the flowers appear!

The children have also taken an active role as gardeners in our outdoor spaces! We currently have snapdragons and nasturtiums in one of our tire garden beds (we sprouted the nasturtiums around the same time we started the beans). Our sunflower seeds are starting to sprout, and hopefully we will be able to transplant them outside soon. And, as a way to celebrate our garden, we are planning an excursion to a local nursery ‘pop up shop’. It’s definitely time to find a few more flowers to beautify our playground!

That being said; as beautiful as flowers are, we wanted to try our hand at growing food plants! We were very excited to discover that some of our herbs (including chives, mint and oregano) came back this year, and we added some thyme! Julie (our food preparer) was excited to clip some chives for one of our picnic lunches last week.

We were very fortunate to purchase large planter boxes this spring, and they have already been put to good use. The beans and peas we planted during our Family Celebration have sprouted, and are also growing quickly; thanks to the children’s thorough watering. We are all excited to see how they will grow over the summer, and if we are really lucky we might have some peas and beans to taste!

It’s been such an exciting process to see how the children are contributing to the garden: we wonder what will happen when the children begin to notice the little peas and beans growing???

Stay tuned! We are all eager to see how all of our gardens will grow over the summer!

Don McMahon, RECE

Hailee King, RECE

Madi Osborne, Educator