March 2011
10 posts
A Puddle, Literally
It’s been warm enough recently to let visiting school groups run around in the gardens, and they’ve been going bonkers over the watering station. As they run up the stairs carrying their watering cans, most of the water sloshes out onto their shoes by the time they get up to the vegetable beds. Yesterday I found one group of kids kneeling in a circle in the open gravel area. When I...
Cuddly Venus Fly Traps
A woman came into the greenhouse the other day and asked if we had any Venus Fly Traps. The flytraps I started from seed a few weeks ago are too tiny to put on display, but I showed her son the baby pitchers growing at the end of the pitcher plant’s leaves and explained their carnivory. He looked a little disappointed.
“He loves Venus Fly Traps,” his mother whispered to me....
3 tags
A Mural for the Cultural Garden
Bit of a lapse in entries there; I’ve been spending my precious few computer hours working on mock ups for a spring mural in the garden.
The vegetable gardens this year will be culturally themed, with a Mexican garden brimming with a mix of flowers and veggies that are native to that region and foods that are culturally important there. Zataar oregano, thyme, chickpeas and figs will go in...
2 tags
Good Question: Sleepy Shamrocks
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Here are our purple shamrocks, Oxalis regnellii. These striking plants in the wood sorrel family are named after the sour oxalic acid in their stems and roots. The triangular leaflets fold down at night like an umbrella, then open up again during the day. Here are three theories scientists have offered to explain why they fold up at night:
1) To reduce heat loss...
2 tags
New Growth: First Coffee Flower
When coffee bushes flower, they usually go up all at once with tons of small white blossoms clustered on the stems like clumps of snow. This one jumped the gun and flowered on its own. Ain’t it grand?
That piece that looks like a spurt coming out of a whale’s blowhole is the bifid style, the female part of the flower. Pollen grains stick to it, then use their internal enzymes to...
1 tag
Kids' Gallery: Bessie's Veggies
Bessie is a volunteer here at the museum. As a reward for working really hard in the garden, I let her draw fantastic portraits of the veggies we’ll be growing this spring. Good deal, right?
Watering Station
We’re sprucing things up outdoors to get ready for spring. One happy new acquisition: New powder-coated watering cans! I got them at Brooklyn Terminal Market, a huge grid of warehouses in Canarsie where you can find wholesale produce, plants, and seasonal merch. Walking around in early March in the afternoon, most of the stores were shuttered but you could see whole pallets of onions...
1 tag
Fixated on Nitrogen
Photo: Greta Pemberton/Brooklyn Children’s Museum
After we pulled the last of the leeks and collards out of the garden last fall, the Kids Crew kids and I planted hairy vetch in the vegetable garden as green manure.
Hairy Vetch can be a real pest if you let it go to flower and self-seed, so I told the kids that if they ever saw it flower, they should pick the flower right away....
3 tags
New Growth: Bean Taste Test
Baby beans, about a week ago. Photo: Greta Pemberton
E. and S., two kids in Kids Crew (the musuem’s afterschool program), sprouted bean seeds in their class at school a few weeks ago. After the lesson, their teacher gave them the young plants to plant at home, and E. and S. asked if they could grow them under the grow lights in the greenhouse.
E. and S. watered their four plants every...
2 tags
Snozzcumbers in the Story Garden
Outside in the Story Garden we feature plants that star in classic children’s books. You’ve got your eponyms (Chrysanthemum, The Carrot Seed, Blueberries for Sal, Jack and the Beanstalk, Where the Red Fern Grows), then there’s a baobab from The Little Prince, lupines from Miss Rumphius, and sweet potato vine from Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters. It’s a jumble of a...
