Aloe Vera and The Vegetable Graveyard

Today was an interesting day for us.  We had the opportunity to transplant some aloe vera plants for another teacher.  We filmed the whole event, but I'll spare you the pain of listening to my West Texas accent and all of my "y'all's" and "ok's."  I took some snapshots from the video instead.  Almost all the kids had heard of Aloe Vera and associated it with sunburn, but I think it was neat for them to see the gel inside the plant and find out where it actually comes from.  

 Our potting mix is about half sand and half garden soil with some gravel mixed in.

 This is our "mama" plant and all of the "babies," there are way to many plants in this pot.

One of the "baby" plants ready for it's own pot.

 We accidentally broke off one of the leaves so I took the opportunity to show the kids the gel inside.  I cut off the skin so they could really see the gel.

We ended up with about 14 new plants, Mrs. Thorn took her "mama" and 5 new plants and let us keep the rest.  A lot of the kids wanted to take one home right away, but I'm going the make them wait a little while.  They need to learn how to take care of these little darlins.

This is our "Vegetable Graveyard"

Monday I brought some of the remnants from our morning juice.  I planted 3 radish tops, 7 carrot tops, 1 celery base and 1purple onion root.  After one day the radish were already growing new leaves and after two days, a few carrots are gaining some new growth.  Today, the celery made it's appearance.  This is one that all the kids are really curious about, I'm not really sure what to expect, so I keep telling them that we just have to wait and see what happens.

Next week we have Spring Break, I hope that all of our seed will germinate over the next week and we come back to lots of little plants to transplant!