Student teachers prepare for the garden party: Week 2

Karine works in the herb garden

This week we worked at planning The Summer Celebration event that will be at the Orchard Garden on Tuesday, June 25 from 12-2pm. The difficulty we had in planning this event is that we are unsure about the number of people who will be visiting and/or the age range of the visitors. We therefore decided to go with activities that would be interesting for a wide range of ages and easy to adapt for various audiences. The plan is to have a tea table by our newly revamped herb garden where we will be serving both hot and iced teas made out of the herbs in the garden. We also planned an art table using materials from the garden, a food table where we will be serving food from the garden, a storytelling space under a special mulberry tree, and a bugs' life table at which we will be discussing the roles of bees and other bugs in the garden. Hopefully, we will have enough visitors to promote this really cool educational garden. 

Learning about teas & peppermint

This week, we also worked at finishing the herb garden and completing the signage for the garden. We created little texts about the different herbs we have in the herb garden and tried to keep them as varied, short, and interesting as possible. The plan is to have the signs up for the Summer Celebration. 

On Wednesday, we had the chance to visit the UBC Botanical gardens, and had a private guided tour by one of the education coordinators who explained us how they planned their school visit and summer camps. They also helped us with generous discounts on plants for our tea garden. We bought four different types of mint and some valerian. Thank you, UBC Botanical Garden!

New potted peppermint plants in the herb garden

One more thing that I learned this week was how important bees and meadows are for food diversity. Here is an interesting link to stun your curiosity...here

Hope you come see us on Tuesday for the summer celebration! 

Karine