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Oklahoma Agriculture in the Classroom

Calendar


September

Plant Some Fall Vegetables

Photo Controlling bugs on the mustard plants with a mild detergent and water spray

There is still plenty of time to plant fall vegetables after school starts. Many of these your students may never have tried. If you have an outdoor classroom, or just a little space outdoors, you can still plant:

  • kale - so pretty it is often planted with pansies in the fall, but you can eat it, too.
  • kohlrabi - what a great vocabulary word.
  • mustard - for mustard greens, but your students might be interested in seeing the plant which produces the seeds that are ground into the condiment they use on their sandwiches.
  • spinach
  • peas
  • Swiss chard
  • turnips

In October, harvest the greens, chop them up, and throw them into a nice soup or stir fry - or have a tasting party and try them raw. Some fall vegetables will even overwinter and start up again early in the spring. Plants grown for harvest in the fall require some special treatment. OSU's Fall Gardening Fact Sheet walks you through the process.

Books
Eclare, Melanie, A Harvest of Color: Growing a Vegetable Garden, Ragged Bear, 2002. (Grades K-3)
A group of neighborhood children transforms a bare patch of earth into a vegetable garden, and in so doing, they learn how to plant in straight rows, how to thin seedlings and how to cope with slugs and worms. They make notes in their efforts and compile useful lists of gardening tips. The result is a colorful, graphic scrapbook-diary-photo album.
Peterson, Cris, and David R. Lundquist, Seed, Soil Sun: Earth's Recipe for Food, Boyds Mills, 2010. (Grades PreK-3)
After establishing that most of our food comes from seeds that grow with the help of soil and sunlight, this book talks a little about each element in the title, how it relates to the growing plant and how photosynthesis allows the plant to make energy. The last few pages tell how we consume the plant's energy as food.
Salas, Laura Purdie, Lettuce Introduce You: Poems About Food, Capstone, 2008. (Grades PreK-2)
Exploration of nutrition through a variety of poetry formats.