August 2013 Update - New school year new discoveries

This year's crop of fourth graders are looking like promising gardeners.  My colleague has already taken her class out to work in the garden three times.  I took mine for the first time to do an outdoor lab.  They were to observe biotic and abiotic things in the garden and record it in their science journals.  They also had the opportunity to sketch what they observed.

We were treated to an entire lifecycle.   Seems some industrious ladybugs decided to help us control our aphids and white flies on our zucchini plant.

Spring in the Garden

Garden Update-Going Native

We are truly going native in our Butterfly Way Station. Last week we made our first trek to the garden in months due to the abundant April and March rains. There were quite a few surprises...sweet peas we planted last year were happily climbing up the chain link fence. Purple Vetch was busy nitrogen fixing. Our native sages were sweetly perfuming the air. Slugs and other decomposers were hard at work breaking down dead plant material.

Finally a Swallowtail Caterpillar

Lots of Life in the Fall Garden

Today the students and I were out on our mission to pull out our dead and dying sunflowers, but we were quickly distracted by the amazing critters that were there. We saw three different butterflies but were only able to identify one of them. One was a white butterfly with a bluish tint with a very distinctive edging to the wings. We saw our first buckeye butterfly and were lucky enough to capture it with the camera. We found some large preying mantis' and a very colorful grasshopper. We also saw at least two different types of moths.

A New Year in the Garden

Last week on August 26 I took my new class of 4th graders to work in the garden for the first time. While working we had our eyes out for critters. We saw a fiery grass skipper right off the bat; there were a lot of bees both honeybees and carpenter bees. The kids really enjoyed looking for new critters.

Today, September 2, we made our third trip to the garden. The students were on the hunt for anything that moved. We were rewarded with praying mantis, grasshoppers, a bevy of beetles (yet to be identified), a cabbage white (who refused to have its picture taken), crickets, chrysalis, and several more unidentified beetles.

Fat and Skinny of it all!

My friend Michael and I found the caterpillar in the soil in the native section. The fat caterpillar is a granulated cutworm. The skinny guy is a hesperiidae, probably a fiery grass skipper caterpillar; they eat lettuce. He was found in the native section near the poppies. They were released near them because they were torn from the ground and replanted into the ground to help it grow. So they were put into the native section. by Michael and Bianca