Hmmm! P-O-T-A-T-O!

That is exactly what my peer (On the left) was think when Mr.Matus's
FIT class made some delicious potato salad with potatoes picked fresh from the Forest Trail garden. The potato salad had a base, of course, potatoes with a mustard and mayonnaise sauce sprinkled with some dill and other exotic spices. And the end result is a very delicious snack for everyone!!!!!

Dill and Thyme

We used dill and thyme to "flavor" the potato salad:
here's the inside story of how we got it

The dill was easy to pick off because half of it was already off and in the compost. That is only relevant  because that is where we got it from. The dill smelled really strong, it was overpowering! You can barely taste the dill in the potato salad. We figured it was OK that it was in the compost because there was not a lot of it. :)

Potata Mixin'

Us mixing in the spices

 Yum! We pulled up some potatoes from our FTE garden to make potato salad. It was really good in this picture we are mixing the spices. We added salt, pepper, garlic salt, and celery salt. We also added dill and thyme that was grown in the garden. We were able to make a lot of the potato salad, and it was really fun to make something then eat it. So you have the satisfaction of eating your work.

Stiring the potato salad!!

Now the ingredients are in the bowl, so now we're going to blog about stirring the potatoes and the other ingredients. After the first group threw in the ingredients the second group stirred it! It took longer then you would think because you had to make sure everything was perfectly stirred and not in a clump. Then the next group served the potatoes after we equally placed 14 potatoes on each plate. And viola, it's done!

Potato Serving

Our plates of potato's

Continuing about the potato salad, this is how we served it. After the mixing we took the spoon, we mixed it with and and put a spoonful of potato salad on each plate. It was a messy business because it fell on the floor and sometimes didn't land on the plates. While I served, the other girls in my group evened out the plates so everyone got an equal amount. It was really fun, and I'll assume the potato salad was good I didn't try it, but the people who did loved it.

Awesome Potato Salad

In Mr. Matus' fit class, we picked potatoes. Then we did all the stuff like mayonnaise and spices. After that we passed it out and ate it. It was amazing, and it was because it was all fresh from our garden. It was a great time to have a break. We all got to stop what we were doing and eat delicious home-made potato salad. That's all we have for now! See you next time!

Potato Salad!

Last week we used the potatoes we harvested to make potato salad. We used Dill and Sage from the garden, and mayonnaise and mustard. After we mixed it all up, they were passed out. Everybody who tried some liked it! We also had many extras for everybody. It was very yummy potato salad considering it was made in a classroom by a group of 5th graders.

Oversized Zucchini

The Zucchini

Did you hear the BIG news? There is some gigantic zucchini that was planted in the garden by Mr. Lofgren's 4th grade class! And it has grown to a Tremendous size! Just look at it! I bet it will be twice its size by tomorrow. By the time we harvest it there will be enough for everyone in FTE!  2 of the 4 zucchinis were 5 inches! And the 5-inch zucchini has just started growing! Go out into the garden and check it out for yourself!!

Shade for the plants

Recently, the Forest Trail garden made a shade cover that goes over the plants to keep them cool without them being deprived of their sunlight. If a fruit gets to hot, then the skin gets hard and you can't eat it. So the shade cover is essential to the garden. The shade cover is like the winter cover because it shields the plants from the climate. You don't need one if you live in a warm climate, though. So as you can see, the garden food would be terrible without a shade cover.

The Potato Patato

On May 14, Mr. Matus's FIT class harvested potatoes. The biggest one was about 3 in tall and 2 in wide! In total we harvested about 50! We harvested all of them by having half the class pulling up one plant then the other half of the class digging up some from the dirt. YUCK!!!! We had to dig much deeper than where we pulled them up to find the other potatoes that fell off.

Hilling Up

The fifth graders at Forest Trail have planted potato's. After about one and a half weeks we had to hill up. Hilling up is when you pile up a bunch of dirt so that the potato's can grow big. It helps it grow big by supporting it as it grows. We hill up about six inches the first time then the second time you can hill up almost six more inches. After hilling up, we had a lot of large potato's, which we pulled out of the ground.

Da Artichoke

Before, the artichoke might not have looked like much but now it has become as pretty as a peach. After the flower bloomed artichoke turn into a very beautiful vegetable. Now everyone is so happy that the artichoke has bloomed into some real high class food so if you are ever in the neighborhood come on by our garden and take a look at the our beautiful artichoke.

Shell Imprints and Fossils

In the garden today we made imprints in modeling clay with shells when we were learning about fossils.they were supposed to look like fossils that you could find. There was a big fossil called ammonite. Some of the fossils were big and some small, but all were very old -duh- they were ONLY 100,000,000 years old that's not much at all for a fossil. Some might have been fossils for 998,998,998 years old (or something like that).

Digging for some POTATOES!

Potatoes and plants going to the decomposing bin.

POTATOES!!!! Today we are digging for potatoes, we got lots of them. Some of the kids got giant 5 inch potatoes. But they were baby potatoes. Some people got this part right at the bottom of the roots, it was all wet and gross. The teachers told us that part was the original potato. The potatoes need to be planted almost on the top of the dirt. Then after that you stack dirt up one foot on the seed and wait tell it is done growing. When the plant is done growing you pull those big, juicy, potatoes out of the ground. We also had to put the remaining part of the plant into the compost bin, there were also so pretty gross things in there. When we were done i asked the teacher if we could eat the potatoes, but she said no. >:()

Wow! We found huge potatoes in the fte garden. It
took us a while to dig them up. We had to use team
work to get up the giant potatoes below. To the
right we have some FTE students that just dug up some
potatoes. The smallest plant we had grew the most
and  largest potatoes, we found three potatoes under
it. We found about 48 potatoes total.

Our largest potato

Compsoting in the garden!

Yes we're back with some more blogging! This time about the garden! Just today (May 14th,2012) we went down to the FTE garden to harvest potatoes and we put the potatoes in a bin and composted the top part (that shows) of the potato. Today we will talk to you about composting! Composting is where you put unused plants into a bin and it will turn into rich nutrients and soil for the plants. The nutrients is in the soil. We dug through the soil looking for potatoes to make potato soup with. We then composted the leafy part and removed the potatoes. After that we brought the potatoes back into our classroom and put them in a big brown box.