Pick Your Own Bouquet Party A Success!

They came, they cut,

they filled buckets and baskets

with blossoms and buds!

Our "Pick Your Own Bouquet Party" was a fun way for old and new Good Shepherd families to connect over the summer. We even had a few community members "discover" our school.

And when it was all over, you couldn't even tell that the flower picking had ever happened! There's plenty more for you to see when school starts!

The sunflowers are heading for the sky! They're now almost three feet over the top of the fence. The flowers are almost open. I wonder if we'll get a good crop of seeds? Yum!

Our zuchinni is almost gone (one more is on the vine) but now we have this yellow squash growing in the Pre-school/Prek-K bed. It is loaded with squash and it's taking over the garden!! I can't wait to see how big it is by the time school starts.

There are lots of tomatos on the tomato plants, but they're still green. We'll have to wait to see if they ripen on the vine.

Check out some of our butterfly's!

This white one is called a Cabbage White. It's a male because it only has one spot on the wing. Females have two spots.

The orange one is a Vanessa anabella, or commonly called a West Coast Lady. It's a member of the brush-footed butterfly family. I can't see any brushy feet, can you?

Both of these butterfly's can be found from Canada to Mexico.

Though many of our flowers are going to seed, there will still be plenty for you to see when you get back in a few weeks. Enjoy your last few weeks of summer! I can't wait to see you. Until then, you can find me in the garden.

Ms. G

Pick Your Own Bouquet Party Planned!

Our garden is so full of flowers, it's a shame to let them go to waste, especially when they make such beautiful bouquets. So, we're going to have a garden party!

Come enjoy our garden, see what you planted and cut your own bouquet of flowers!

When: Friday, July 30th
Time: 4:30 to 6:30 p.m.
Where: Good Shepherd Garden
What to bring: garden clippers or shears and a container to hold your bouquet.
Who: Everyone is invited! Tell your friends and neighbors.

Refreshments will be provided. No RSVP necessary - just drop on by!

I hope to see you there - Ms. G.

Garden Pressing Party a Small Success!

Take a garden full to overflowing with beautiful flowers, and add some energetic kids, parents, teachers, then mix with recycled phone books and some scissors and what do you have?
Good Shepherd's first Flower Pressing Party!

On Thursday, July 22, I was joined in the garden by the Kaufmann family, Victoria, Noah, Sonja and Johann, to learn how to collect and press flowers. Sonja started cutting Cosmos, daisies and poppies for her collection. Don't they make a beautiful bouquet?

Victoria and Noah were busy with their own collections of Bachelor Buttons, California Poppies and a variety of other flowers.

After they cut their flowers, they placed them carefully between the pages of an old phone book for pressing. Their are lots of different ways to press flowers, but I've found the good, old-fashioned phone book the easiest and cheapest. Maybe we can learn to make plant presses during school this year.

We left about 100 pages between flower samples, and we'll have to check them every week or so and move them to a dry page to prevent molding. I made the mistake of using acid free paper covered with wax paper, and my flowers molded (Off to the compost bin with you!).

Noah had his own personal style to pressing flowers! But I suggest you add a couple of large books, some bricks or paving stones. It would be hard to sit on your flowers for several weeks until they dry!

When the flowers are dry, they can use them to decorate notecards, picture frames or make their own original artwork. Don't worry, there are lots of flowers left, so I'm sure we'll be able to do some more flower pressing when school starts.

We had to wait a while for the flowers to dry, so I started collecting see pods. We can use them to plant more flowers next yeaI'm new to this, so I'm doing a little experiment. I took one set of seed pods and placed them in a box on a paper towell. I took another set and just put them together in a small paper bag. I'll keep an eye on them to see how they dry and if either process is better at preventing mold. The bag method is easier and we could get a lot more seed pods in less time, but if the box method has less mold, it will be worth the time and effort. I'll let you know how it goes

We also harvested some of the vegetables that were ready. Look at the size of this potato! Should we eat it, or save it for seed for next year? Hmmmm? Let me know what you think I should do.

Johan really got into picking the Pre-School zucchini. We all enjoyed the zucchini bread I made from another one I picked yesterday. I had three different types, one with raisins (my personal favorite), one with walnuts, and one with chocolate chips (the kid's favorite).


Here's the recipe if anyone is interested. Let me know if you have your own favorite garden recipes.

Zucchini Bread (by Yvonne Bailey)

3 eggs 1 cup cooking oil

2 cups sugar 2 cups zucchini, grated

1 tablesppon vanilla 3 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon baking powder 1 tablesppon cinnamon

1 cup nuts, chopped and/or chocolate chips or raisins

Beat eggs until light. Add oil, sugar, vanilla and zucchini. Mix lightly but well. Sift together flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon and baking powder, then add to the eggs and zucchini and mix until blended. Add nuts, chocolate chips or raisins and stir again. Pour into two greased 9 x 5 x 2 bread pans. Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour or until bread tests done (an inserted toothpick out clean). This recipe freezes well, so you can use up all that zucchini and enjoy it the rest of the year.

Miss Sue and Johann agree,"We love our school garden!"

Stay tuned for more special events. And as always, you'll find me in the garden!

Ms. G.

July 6th - Another foggy morning full of surprises!

It's only been a week or so and it's amazing to see the changes going on in the garden. More flowers are blooming and everything is getting taller. The compost bins were getting visited by a unknown critter, so they were moved to the asphalt area by the garden shed. This will prevent critters from digging under them and it opens another walkway into the garden. Our compost is looking good! We should have enough home-made compost to replenish our beds this fall! Our worms are doing exceptionally well, too!

Wouldn't it be great if we could compost all of our lunch and snack leftovers from the whole school?


The corn in the preschool bed is up to about 3 1/2 feet tall. There isn't any silk yet, but when we see some we'll have to hand pollinate it to get corn to eat. Stay tuned!

A whole bunch of these large poppies have come up this week, in pink, red and white. The look like Icelandic Poppies, but I think they're Wooly Poppies. I'll try keying them out to be sure, but in the meantime, they're gorgeous!

It looks like what I though was a pumpkin is really a zuchinni in the Pre-school bed. This one just appeared over the course of 3 days!

And those mystery plants in what I thought was the 4th or 5th grade bed are now looking like sunflowers. There are also some potatoes planted in this bed! Okay, which class planted sunflowers and potatoes? Let me know so I can give you credit. They look great! I wonder if the potatoes will taste like the ones we get in the store?

The cosmos are busy attracting butterflies and bumble bees, as are the poppies. We actually have a few white poppies as well as the gold ones.

The small, white flower mixed in with the poppies is a different type of baby's breath. It's so beautiful mixed in with the other flowers.

Does anybody know what this red flower is? It's about the size of a nickel and has single flowers on branching stems. It was part of the wildflower mix we planted but I haven't been able to identify it yet. I'll keep trying, but if you have any ideas, let me know!

The lupine is almost done now, and I've started collecting the seed pods to dry so we can plant them next year. The rest of the flowers are going great guns, with new ones showing up every day (or maybe I'm just seeing news ones everyday).

Who knows what I'll see tomorrow or next week! Stay tuned!

God bless and I'll see you in the garden!

Ms. G.

July 14 - A sunny day! It's a miracle!

Wow! It's actually a sunny morning! This is a miracle! My sister from New York is constantly telling me how I should appreciate our cold fog (as opposed to their hot fog), and I do, honest, but it sure feels nice to wake up to a morning without the gray skies. I think our garden likes it, too. Look at the size of everything! The sunflowers are getting huge and are ready to produce flowers. We should have a good collection of seeds to enjoy for the Harvest Festival in October.

The zuchinni squash in the Pre-school bed is getting bigger, too. Any bets on how big it will be by school?

With some help the last of the female Kiwi plants were planted today against the fence. We have three females and two male plants. We won't get fruit this year, but it will be really interesting to see the differences between the plants as they grow.

The Redwood Retreat is a wonderful, cool hide-away. The hydrangea's are blooming (we have three different kinds, one of which is a climbing hydrangea) and the ferns are all doing well. Thanks to a couple of students and their families, we should have a couple of benches to sit on by school.

If you are interested in making a bench for the Redwood Retreat, please e-mail me at thomasgarske@comcast.net. I have a set of plans with everything you need to purchase to make one 4-foot bench. We would like them all to be the same to they fit in this space. Remember, any money and/or time spent can go towards parent hours and middle school community service hours!

The garden beds are so full, they're overflowing into the walkways! Since the flowers need pruning and we don't want to waste them, I'm planning a flower pressing party on Thursday, July 22, from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.. You can cut and press your own flowers, cut bouquets to dry, or take home a fresh bunch of flowers for someone you care about. I'll send out an email at the end of this week with a list of supplies for you to bring.

Contact me at thomasgarske@comcast.net if you're interested in joining in. Children are welcome with parent supervision.

God bless and I'll see you in the garden!

Ms. G.

Unexpected Visitors!

Hmmmmmm! I wonder who this hole belongs to? As I survey the new "blight" on our beautiful school garden, I am overcome with a sense of protection against this unwanted intruder. But then I remember a time last summer, with my foot in a cast, I spent a morning observing a similar varmit gleefully rearranging my home garden.

Gopher in the Garden Reflection
As I enoy some summer sun, I see a slight movement out of the corner of my eye. I freeze and patiently wait to see if the movement will be repeated, and I am rewarded with the sighting of a small gopher peeking out at me. He timidly, slowly, haltingly sticks his head out of his hole just far enough to snag a bit of grass or nibble on a weed. And then, POOF, he drops back into his hole, his perceived area of safety that he has built around himself. He is cautious, but persistent. As he judges it’s safe, he ventures out for longer bits of time and goes a little farther. Now he is bulldozing some of the dirt from his hole, “cleaning house”, expanding his domain, reaching out. Always on the lookout for hawks, humans and the curious dog. He’s only trying to survive in a hostile world, just like the rest of us.

How does this little brown, industrious, timid gopher exemplify the glory of God’s creation? What can we learn from him? To be persistent? To work hard? To reach out despite the dangers? To expand our horizons and connections? To always keep an eye out for danger? To bulldoze away the old stuff in our lives that is blocking our tunnel of growth and connection to the rest of the colony? To take life in little bites and not try and do it all at once? To stop and sniff the air, taste the plants, feel the warm , moist soil? Or maybe the key is just for ME to stop the world and watch another creature for a while, reaffirming our connection and interdependence through the grace of God. Okay, we’re connected and you are darn cute, but could you limit your actions to the field and not the lawn?

How do we live with the gophers of our world? The cute creatures who seem to have no other role but the destruction of our hard work and the placement of obstacles in our way over which to stumble and fall? How do we not only coexist, but live together in harmony? When the gopher is in the field, I deem him “harmless” even “cute” because I don’t care about the condition of the field. But when his mounds appear in the middle of my prize patch of lawn or I see one of my garden plants disappearing in jerky motions down a hole, he becomes a “nuisance”, even an “enemy”, and my emotions change from pleasant indifference to one of angry “this is war!”. Is it the gopher that has changed? No, it’s “my territory” that has changed, the value I place on the territory based on the amount of effort I have put into making it “perfect” and “pleasing” in my own view. I’m sure the gopher sees his mounds and holes as perfect and pleasing to him as well, and he gets equally perturbed when I level the mounds and fill in the holes. The difference is, he isn’t coming into my kitchen and placing a block of poison in my refrigerator to annihilate me and my family. Maybe the answer is to change the picture from “my” garden and “my” lawn to “our garden” and “our lawn”. Maybe I need to use more gopher baskets to protect plants and gopher wire to protect the lawn, and stop the use of the poison. Maybe I should put as much energy into learning to live with the gopher as I do in trying to get rid of them. Will they totally destroy the lawn? I don’t think so, but it will look different from what I have come to expect, and maybe that’s okay. Maybe we need to look at our world as becoming something different from what we have known and expect, and realize that we need to work together to create a new vision of what the world can and “should” be. One where the gophers and the gardeners respect each others work and place in creation. One where I give up some of my view of the “garden" so that they can live. A world where gopher holes and mounds can live peacefully side-by-side with lawns and gardens.
It will take a huge shift in my mind-set, but I'll keep working on it. In the mean time, I think I'll just watch this "cute" little guy a while longer.

Pat Garske, July 2009

The Birth - or rebirth - of our Garden

In the beginning, there were weeds! Weeds as tall as a table top covering the garden in a sea of green neglect.

And as the weeds were whacked by our mightly Senor Suarez, many wonderful plants were revealed, such as dwarf apple, lavender and rosemary - survivors from a not too distant past. Also unearthed were remnants of garden beds, built with love and care, and used by many classes of students until they fell by the wayside and became forgotten.

Other areas were used for storage and left to the spiders and salamanders.

Ours was a secret garden, ready to be reclaimed!

And God said, "Hey, clean up this mess!"

And so it was! In the spring of 2008 a group of parents, teachers and students, on fire with a vision for this space, cleared the land, removed the garbage and set forth to re-create a garden for all students to use and enjoy!

They came,

they rototilled

they raked and leveled,

They putteth down weed block,

and spreadeth bark to keep the weeds from intruding. (Not the God doesn't love weeds as much as other plants!)

Look God! No wood chips!

And the garden was ready for the next step.



And God (and his littlest gardeners) saw that it was good.

But wait! What about the ugly fence?

And God said, "Plant roses and vines to cover the ugly fence and provide flowers and fragrances to be enjoyed by all!"

And so the 6th grade class, with the help of their little buddies in 1st grade, planted Joseph Coat roses, Passion Flower, Lady Banks and Cecil Bruner roses, and Bouganvilla.

And the students were filled with great joy and took great care of their charges,

watering often,

(real men plant flowers!)

bonding over bouganvilla,

relocating weeds,

and preparing the way for garden boxes to be built and filled the following fall.


And with the help of the next year's students, the garden took root and grew!