Garden and Nutrition Activities To Do at Home: Living Necklace

Victory Gardens are making a comeback, locally and all over country. OSU Extensions’s Online Vegetable Gardening Course (currently offerred for free) has over 17,000  people signed up. Seed catalog companies are posting notices that they’ve been overwhelmed with orders and to be patient on getting yours. When everything feels out of control, as it does right now through this current COVID-19 Pandemic, it feels good to do something tangible for yourself, your family and your community, and for many people right now that is to plant a garden. Frankly, we’re thrilled about that. Being that we can no longer work with students to do hands on garden and nutrition based education, we’re helping to bring it to the students in their own homes. Here’s how we plan to do that in the coming weeks:

• The Kansas Avenue Learning Garden will still be planted, and we are excited to grow and donate all of our food for The Family Kitchen. We’ve been bringing them extra greens and tomatoes for years, but this will be new to grow food specifically for them. They serve nutritious food using donation and volunteers to anyone who needs it, no questions asked. As more people will be needing their services (which are currently offered in to-go containers for the time being) this seems like the best use of our food growing space. We will be making weekly update videos to share on our social media channels with students and the community at large.
• Happy Hour in the Garden will be back later this spring, instead of its usual May kick-off. We’re thinking of ways that people might be able to help out while maintaining strict physical distancing policies and other sanitary procedures. Stay tuned for developments later this spring as we come up with alternate plans.
• Grab & Go Garden and Nutrition Activity Kits are a new initiative we are hoping to offer to families weekly. Tomorrow we will be at Redmond School District’s School Closure Meal Distribution Site at Redmond HS. We partnered with their Nutrition Services department to get approval from the school district to be on site, as well as Oregon Agriculture in the Classroom who sent us materials for our first week’s activity, Living Necklace. If you’re in Redmond, please stop by and say hi – from at least 6′ away – and pick up a packet for your family to experiment with seed germination at home. Not in Redmond? Good news, the materials for this weeks activity you can probably find at home, and as I’m now working at home, I enlisted my 7 year old daughter to help me create my first video. So yeah, the dog is barking a bit, we’re both wearing unicorn outfits, and it took me forever to do basic editing, so be gentle with me.
• Here’s some resources for you to Make a Living Necklace of your own this week.
  • Make a Living Necklace –  Watch our 3 minute ‘how-to’ video to see what you need and how it’s done.
  • Storytime with Tracy – Watch our FoodCorps Service Member read the Dr. Suess style book ‘Oh Say Can You Seed’ to kick off your seed germination activities. Watch again a week later to connect parts of the story with your emerging seedling.
  • Living Necklace lesson plan – Download this lesson plan from Oregon Agriculture in the Classroom to more information on how to extend the learning with your students or your own kids at home.
  • Weekly Recipe: Dr Suess’ Family Snack– Download our packet info sheet that includes a simple yummy recipe to make with kids.
• Gardening with Kids at Home – My new coworker and I will be making weekly videos of fun, simple garden based activities to do at home with your kids. Stay tuned to our social media channels and Living The Green emails to see new videos – in the works we have Making Seed Tape, Making Seed Bombs, and Tips for Gardening with Kids.

Have a question, tip to share, or something you want to see covered? Email me and let me know!
Stay healthy, denise