Teaching as Gardening, or Another Reason I'm Against Common Core

It's been a long slow slog toward Spring here in the mid-Atlantic this year; on the way to school the other day, Monkey actually sighed wistfully and said, "I wish it was Spring!" I had to break it to her that not only was it already Spring, it had in fact BEEN Spring for over a month. She was understandably underwhelmed as she shivered in the car on the way to school. LOL

Finally, though, we've had a couple weeks without frost, and so I've planted a good portion of my veggies in the garden bed reserved for that purpose. I started, naturally, with the cold-resistant plants: kale, beets, spinach, carrots, peas. These are the ones that grow best in the early spring and in fact, many of them don't do well in too much heat, so once Summer kicks in, the peas will die back and be replaced by cucumbers, and the lettuce will become bitter and the spinach will "bolt," growing tall and sending up a center stem and flowering and going to seed, because their "window" has passed. That, though, is when the green beans, summer squash, strawberries, herbs, tomatoes, and okra tend to flourish, in the warmer and hotter weather of later Spring and through the Summer. Once Summer draws to a close, there will be other vegetables to harvest in Fall, some even after the first frost, that aren't even planted yet (but will give us lots of food thru Fall and Winter). In other words, it's not just one garden "season," but a sequence of "seasons."