Summer Camp Recap: Urban Gardeners

By Carolyn Carlins, Facilitator, Science Education and Research

Summer Camp Recap is our weekly seasonal segment featuring our summer camp programs. This is the place for camp parents to find pictures of their campers in action and see the fun things we did all week. It’s also a great place for educators to pick up craft, story and lesson ideas for their own early childhood programs.

This week our Budding Botanists and Mighty Mentors learned how to create beautiful landscapes in the city during our Urban Gardeners summer camp. To begin our week we visited the urban gardens of Phipps (the CSL Landscape, the Edible Garden, and Japanese Garden) and met with a Phipps landscape architect who taught us how to best design the outdoors. To put our skills to the test, we designed and planted our own mini landscapes, adding something new each day.

Throughout the week we explored the science of soil, studied pollinators in our own backyard, and learned how our food goes from the farm to the table. We even had a chance to help Phipps’ own Farmer Mike pick ripe tomatoes in the Edible Garden, weigh our produce, and deliver the harvest to the Phipps Café refrigerator. To close, we used our creativity to create Rube Goldberg machines that deliver food from farm to table.

Urban Gardens:

Make a difference in an urban garden! Biodiversity is an important part of our ecosystems and every local habitat has its own unique features. Did you know that pollinators like bees have a hard time finding the flowers that they need in urban environments? Animals such as bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds need an ample supply of diverse, pollen and nectar rich plants. We can be sustainable citizens and support our communities by sowing native wildflowers. Transform a garden or empty lot near you into a pollinator paradise!