Gotta a Green Thumb?

The kids love to help water the flowers outside our apartment. This past week we took their gardening experiences to a whole new level. The City of Fort Collins opened a Children's Garden last Spring. It is located very close to our apartment. We finally made it over there in the scorching heat last week on our bikes. Luckily the main attraction is water! They have watering cans available to use on site and a huge watering can that dumps water into a pool where the kids can fill up their buckets. It brought so much joy to all of them. Jacob and Hannah loved watering everything in sight! And Luke sat up on the concrete next to the water and splashed.That same afternoon I took the kids down to our garden plot - available through the university. Here is a picture of the kids at our plot. I'll have to take more pictures when I have the sun in the right spot.... The little white shed in the background is stocked with all your gardening needs -- tools, hoses, gardening gloves, etc. -- provided by the university. Up to this point they hadn't spent much time at the garden. Pat prepared the garden and I have spent a lot of evenings after the kids are tucked in bed down at the garden - planting, weeding and watering. They loved helping weed and water (they wanted to be watered too - it was so hot that day -- upper 90s).

Here is Jacob holding his bean plant. We transplanted it -- he had started it as a project at school. Friday we harvested our first head of leaf lettuce for our salad that evening. We made a big deal of the lettuce being sown in our garden and it worked -- the kids actually ate lettuce and liked it! They're normally not very keen on leafy vegetables.
With gardening come worms! Hannah loves to play with worms! She was thrilled to find a 10" long worm one morning as we watered the flowers out front. Unfortunately I didn't get this worm on camera -- but a smaller one she found a few days later.
I'm thankful to have space to garden -- both out front of our apartment and down the hill from our apartment. And I'm glad my kids have fun gardening.