children's garden conference. 209 



will be made alive by the contact every child has with real good earth 

 and real live plants. If the garden lessons could be continued through 

 the school months the children's interest in the outdoor work would be 

 kept awake during that period when their gardens are sleeping under the 

 snow of our New England winters. There is plenty of material for these 

 lessons. 



In September the new class, preferably seventh grade, is taken out to 

 examine the condition of the plants, the seeds, and the weeds in the 

 garden after a summer's cultivation. In October and November the 

 garden is cleared, the shrubs are pruned, the ground is dug and fertilized, 

 perennials and bulbs are planted, and the garden covered for the winter. 



Planting of bulbs in the school rooms is done now also. In connection 

 with the fall work the children are taken to the fruit and flower ex- 

 hibitions in the city where the examples they see give unimagined pleasure 

 and arouse great interest in '' growing things. " During the winter months 

 of December and January lessons on the soil and experiments in germi- 

 nation go far to prepare the children's understanding of what they must 

 do and see when the outdoor work begins. In February seeds are planted 

 in window boxes so that the small tomatoes and cabbages will be ready 

 to set out as soon as the weather will permit. With March come the 

 catalogues, the garden plans, the buying of seed, etc. April, May, and 

 June present more work than can well be done in the allotted two hours 

 a week. When school closes in June many of the children for one reason 

 or another are unable to attend to their beds. But as many as are able 

 continue to appear at stated hours to continue the work and the vacant 

 places are filled by other children. A part of the vacation work — or 

 pleasure — are the excursions to the market gardens of Arlington where 

 the children are enabled to see on a large scale what they have already 

 seen on a tiny scale in their little city plots. The work done in the vaca- 

 tion months is in the entire charge of a voluntarj^ committee in coopera- 

 tion with the school authorities. There has been an attempt to cooperate 

 with the vacation schools. 



If a child has attended school regularly and has been able to care for 

 his garden in the summer he has seen performed under his eyes a complete 

 cycle in the vegetable life. Add to this the correlation with his other 

 school studies and the garden becomes a real part and a valuable part 

 not onlv of his life but of the life of the world. 



In his arithmetic he can find the area of his own garden instead of an 

 imaginary field; from his window box he can study a right angle; in his 

 manual training class he makes the window box, the markers, and some- 

 times even the tools; in his geography he learns in what part of the country 

 is grown the hemp, flax, and grains, specimens of which he sees in his 

 own plot; in his drawing class he draws a flower or seed from his own 

 garden instead of one brought by the teacher; in the cooking class the 

 girl cooks her own vegetables; in the language class the boj^s and girls 

 write letters to the seedmen for catalogues or to the agricultural depart- 



