GRUBS Camp Day 4 - Growing Your Own Food

Day four started with a story, “Jesse’s Jungle of Food”. This story introduces not only growing your own food, but more importantly the idea of diversity in a garden, and also companion planting. After the story we played a companion planting game, where the kids were each a plant from a garden (tomato, zucchini, nasturtium, etc.). Each plant had a brief description of what it likes (i.e. shade, loose soil, etc.) as well as other plants it likes to be around or kept away from. Then the kids had to ‘plant’ a garden. They had a lot of fun and it looked pretty cute with all the kids in various plant poses.

After the game we took the kids to see some backyard chickens at a local house. The kids were able to feed the chickens some chickweed from the Compost Education Centre (CEC), pet the chickens, and even hold a fresh egg. It was still warm from the chicken sitting on it and they seemed to really like that.



We then headed back the CEC and I read them the Legend of the Three Sisters, a traditional aboriginal story from the North Eastern United States, St. Lawrence, and Great Lakes regions. The story tells the tales of three sisters (representing squash, beans, and corn) and how they needed each other to survive. These three crops were traditionally planted together, with the beans fixing nitrogen into the soil for the corn and squash, the corn providing a stalk for the beans to grow up, and the squash protecting the shallow roots of the corn, as well as spreading out and impeding weeds and other plants. In addition sunflowers were often planted to attract bees for pollination, aphids to keep them off the other plants, and as a lure for birds so they would eat the sunflower seeds instead of the corn.

After lunch we helped the kids to plant some seeds for them to take home. They planted nasturtiums, a beautiful flower that attracts pollinators and keeps aphids off other plants, as well as having edible leaves and blooms! They also planted red riding hood lettuce, a green lettuce edged in red with a tangy flavour, as well as a three-sisters tomato (completely coincidental!) a variety that produce three different plants with three different shaped tomatoes. All the variety were organic heritage varieties and the kids were so excited to be able to take them home, watch them grow and transplant them into their own gardens (whether in a yard or a container). The day ended with the kids getting to transplant some lettuce from the CEC greenhouse into one of the beds, something they would hopefully be doing a few weeks with their own plants!