Sunday, March 15, 2009

imperfections in my classroom

lets do four...

  • dead seedlings--- that's what a lack of water will do to a young (or old plant). The good news is that only a few were done in by this neglect. That's the problem with cooking on Mondays, I didn't take a close enough look at all our seedlings.
  • confused peppers--- I took the suggestion of one of my students and we planted a pepper which thrived in pots. I thought, why not do something nice for folk with patio gardens. Then we planted two types of peppers in the same seed pack. That's right, it included the one just mentioned. As the Mighty Assistant said to me as I was chastising myself... "You were having too much fun joking around with the students."
  • sell them fresh--- to annoy the Human Suggestion Box, we made Lavender Blueberry Muffins, and while they were OK a day or two old (hungry students still ate them) they were nothing like the ones fresh from the oven. Fortunately most sold the day we baked. Yes, that would be the day the seedlings died.
  • poor sentence structure--- I am a descendent of a long line of Pennsylvanian Germans. We say things like, "throw the cow over the fence some hay." I am sure I said clearly what I wanted my students to do. I am also sure they did what I told them to do. So instead of three seedlings in every section of a seed pack, we ended up with nine in some cases...


What we do next is divide them one to a section burying part of the stem to keep the plants stocky and full of roots ...

The good news is that even a place as lovely as Longwood Gardens...

But even Longwood has its imperfections...


5 comments:

Rob (ourfrenchgarden) said...

Hi Wayne

well, "throw the cow over the fence some hay." made me smile.

I have to say how organised your seed sowing looks. Despite the light neglect.

Rob

tina said...

You are not kidding about the 'backwards' wording in German. A hard thing for me to learn when learning German. I got a good chuckle. Longwood is beautiful.

Wayne Stratz said...

Rob and Tina--- glad I could make you smile with the cow quote. The seedlings made it through the weekend and as one group finished baking in the kitchen with the Mighty Assistant, I took another group to make sure the seedlings were truly OK. We have so many.

doyle said...

Plants are more like us than most of us would like to admit, maybe more so.

I enjoyed the post.

Perfection is overrated--it's an imperfect world, but still a lovely one.

Wayne Stratz said...

Doyle--- as I tell my students... if you strive for perfection you will end up perfectly silly.