Teachers: Think about bulbs

Many teachers like the idea of making gardens part of their teaching. Gardens have a lot to teach -- about plants, about soil, about science and math, about patience, about responsibility, about food. And many teachers, when they think garden, think vegetables. They want to use a school garden, like the White House vegetable garden, to teach about nutrition and the pleasures of wise eating. And they figure the appeal of growing something you can eat will keep kids interested.

But there are practical problems with this approach. One is that many teachers don't know much about gardening and don't know where to start. Vegetable gardening isn't rocket science, but there is a learning curve. And the easy vegetables that are best for beginners -- radishes, lettuce -- are not high on the average kid's list of favorite snacks.

Another big problem is that the normal Chicago-area school year doesn't fit well with the vegetable-growing season. Assume that you start vegetable seeds in the classroom in the winter to plant outdoors in the spring. Seed-starting is magical for kids -- watching a little bitty brown nubbin turn into a little green sprout on the windowsill (especially if you do the seed-starting in transparent plastic containers so they can watch the roots grow).

But when it's planting-out time in Chicago in the middle of May, the school year is almost over. The kids will never see a crop. The vegetables will likely die over the summer with no one to water and weed.

And the few vegetable species that you can plant outdoors earlier in spring so kids have a chance to eat what they grow are . . . well, lettuce and radishes. And spinach. Yum.

To ease these difficulties, I have two suggestions:

1. Ask for help. The University of Illinois Extension educators and Master Gardeners volunteers help a lot of school gardens get started (find your local office here). They can help you figure out what it's practical to try. The National Gardening Association has a fine web site on the topic, kidsgardening.com. And out of Lake County, Anne Nagro runs GardenABCs.com, a forum about learning gardens for parents, teachers and volunteers.

The Chicago Botanic Garden has curriculum help, training courses for teachers and an online School Garden Wizard to help with the planning. The extension also has a site on planning a school garden.

2. Try bulbs. The kids can't eat them, but they can certainly plant them. They're easy, they're pretty and they coincide perfectly with the school year: You plant them in October and they bloom, depending on species, from March through May.

You don't need a lot of space or even a plot of ground; with the OK of the principal and the janitor, bulbs might be tucked into the existing school landscape. Or perhaps (with permission) into a nearby park.

Imagine a cluster of crocuses planted right by the school door, poking their tender shoots up even while there's still snow on the ground. Imagine the kids watching and monitoring and measuring and anticipating until the flowers open their brave petals in March. Couldn't you teach to that?

Check out the Bulb Project. It's a web site on planting bulbs with school children, sponsored by the U.S. Netherlands Flower Bulb Information Center, the press information office of the Dutch flower bulb industry. There are suggested projects and plenty of information about bulbs to get you started.

Another component of the project is asking garden retailers to sponsor bulb-planting projects at schools. There's one funding source to consider. It doesn't have to be an expensive project, if you can borrow some digging tools, can get some compost donated and have a hose available. $200 or $300 would buy quite a few bulk tulip and daffodil bulbs.

Bulbs have an interesting biology, which can certainly provide plenty of science lessons. You could dissect a bulb and see the layers, like an onion's, and figure out what they are for. You could force some bulbs, such as paperwhite narcissus, crocus, early daffodils or hyacinths, into bloom on the classroom windowsill in winter or early spring.

You could discover how bulb-forming plants reproduce (hint: there's more than one way). You could discuss why the pointy end (ideally) goes upward in the hole (and why it's not actually essential). You could talk about why the bulbs don't bloom in winter and how they know when it's time to start growing. You could chart the expected bloom times, collect data on when the plants actually sprout and flower and monitor the weather to search for explanations.

And it's not just biology. Kids could study up on the Netherlands, where most of the bulbs sold in the U.S. today are grown, and then on the countries where the bulbs actually evolved -- Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan. Show them the stylized tulips in the design of a Persian rug and have them design their own rugs. Learn about the how bulbs were imported to Europe and how the Dutch grow them today. Teach about the wild tulip market bubble of the 1600s and compare it to other bubbles -- real estate? stock market, anyone?

But the best lesson from bulbs is the sheer wonder that a dry, brown, often shriveled and ugly thing can go in the ground in fall, when leaves are dropping and the world is turning gray, seemingly dead or at least in a coma, and, when it's ready, become something wonderful. Like a child.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.