Learning to Garden -Teaching and Learning in Adulthood
Overview
This is my PLP assignment for college.
I wanted to focus on something that I wanted to learn, because I have a small farm. I thought incorporating the idea of learning to grow vegetables, or any plant for that matter indoors, and keep it indoors for the purpose of having food, would be a beneficial thing to learn.
Gardening for the first time - Insights
How Hard Can This Be?
My first attempt at gardening started off pretty easy. Because I live in Northern New England, growing plants indoors and transferring them outside can be tricky due to the risk of frost in the early summer, late spring, and having to protect the plants from insects, birds, rodents, and deer.
-I wanted to teach myself a way to grow plants year round and that was environmentally friendly, and used the least amount of resources like water.
-I purchased a garden kit where the plants grow indoors from a hybriponic indoor gardening system. This system recirculates water in a closed loop, which reduces water usage significantly. You can purchase the pods that are pre-seeded with the vegetables you want to grow, or you can buy pods where you can literally put any growable plant seed inside it.
-As a beginner at this process, I wanted to start small. So I picked two different types of lettuce. I picked Batavian Endive Lettuce and Arugula. I used 3 pods of each plant to learn this process.
-Why I chose lettuce and these two types were because lettuce is relatively easy to grow, it grows quickly, and they're my favorite combination for salads. Growing a small variety for this first experience would give me the opportunity to see how each of these plants grow, if they require a lot of time and care, and if they tasted delicious being grown indoors instead of outside.
Starting the plants
Let's Get This Plant Party Started
Starting the lettuce seeds, and waiting for them to sprout, didn't take very long. In fact, these plants grew rather quickly!
-Endive lettuce began to sprout within 7 days
-Arugula lettuce began to sprout 7 to 14 days. Some of the plants started quicker than others. I'm not sure why some of the arugula sprouted quicker than the arugula plants, but the plants matured within the same time.
Caring for the plants
Nurture those Greens
I found that growing the lettuce is relatively simple. But since the lettuce grows quickly, I found that I had to care for it daily.
-Endive lettuce needed to be pruned regularly to keep the roots and leaves healthy.
-Arugula lettuce was a little tricky during this learning experience. I had to regularly prune the leaves or harvest them, and I had to make sure that I kept the yellow-flowering stems from growing, as this changes the taste of the lettuce.
Harvesting the plants
Time To Bring In The Harvest
-Endive Lettuce: So during this learning experience, I found that I can start harvesting Endive lettuce within 3 weeks after starting the seedling. The best part of the lettuce to harvest are the tender center leaves as the heart of the plant.
What I found cutting the outer leaves, they are slightly more bitter than the center cut. For this learning process, I cut the majority of the lettuce down to the heart of the plant, to maximize the amount of lettuce to consume.
I then washed the harvested lettuce and dried them, placing them in a lettuce storage bag to keep in my refrigerator.
-Arugula: I treated the Arugula the same way I harvested the Endive lettuce. The growth time was about the same as the Endive lettuce.
Same thing, I washed the leaves, dried them, and then stored them in a lettuce storage bag to keep in my refrigerator.
-Taste:
I mixed both types of lettuce into one salad, and shared it with my husband. We had our own special vinagarette dressing and other toppings including candied pine nuts to go with the lettuce. One plant of the Endive lettuce and the other of Arugula was enough for my husband and I to have a full serving a vegetables. The taste was absolutely delicious!
Gardening Success and Failures
Successes:
-I was able to successfully grow the endive lettuce and arugula.
-Harvesting the leaves to make salads was the best part of this learning experience.
Failures:
-I over clipped the leaves on the endive lettuce, so after the first couple of cuts, the lettuce stopped producing leaves!
-The arugula, I couldn't keep up with keeping the outer stems trimmed, or delay the plant from bolting by keeping the yellow-flowering stems cut as they appeared.
Even though I was using an indoor gardening system, I found out that you can still kill your plants! I will be doing more research on the types plants I grow to ensure I am not overcutting or causing the plant's life to shorten!
Using Bloom's Taxonomy, I have created the following assessments on this learning process.
- Research and then describe the most important steps on harvesting lettuce throughout its productive lifespan to prevent the lettuce from stopping its production of leaves.
- Then demonstrate your understanding by applying the tips learned in the next set of lettuce plants being grown.
Outcomes and Assessment
My gardening experience is important to me as I have a small farm, and homesteading is my goal. I found that the following outcomes would be important before taking on planting lettuce outside, or growing an abundance of lettuce and other vegetables using the hybriponic gardening system within my home.
- Growing lettuce based on need - acquire all the knowledge on the different types of lettuce, how much each individual plant provides for two people, and how many plants should be grown at the same time to support two people.
- Try growing lettuce inside the home using an in-home garden system, to see if the process is easier than growing outdoors, and if the quality of the lettuce is comparable to what would be purchased at a food market or farmers market.
- Growing lettuce for taste- Explore the different types of lettuce, whether its done by purchasing lettuce at a local super market or farmer's market and finding which ones taste the best to grow at home.
- Evaluate how and when to harvest the lettuce to maximize the plant's life.
- Develop and implement a plan to maintain and harvest the lettuce so that the life of the plant can be maximized before having to regrow more plants.
- Share the knowledge with others to encourage them to grow their own food, even inside their homes to encourage better eating habits and to incorporate a healthy, more environmentally friendly lifestyle.
Assessment of the outcomes could include:
- List and explain the methods to grow lettuce, including indoor and outdoor.
- Incorporate recipes that can be used with the grown food.
- Build a timeline and a cost chart to determine if growing lettuce and other vegetables using an indoor gardening system for the life of the plant, or growing outside are more cost-effective.
- Develop a social media channel or wordpress site to share the knowledge to viewers. Create "tags" to draw interest.
Insights and Rationale for Gardening
Insights
Learning to garden has endless benefits. Besides learning to grow your own food, its beneficial for your health and for the environment.
Indoor gardening wouldn't be beneficial for the wildlife in your backyard, but it would be beneficial inside your home. Gardening relieves stress, and gives you the ability to learn and nurture something. But the most important thing is that you're growing your own produce to become more sustainable at home, and to reduce your environmental impact.
- Determine what works best for you and your living arrangements. Can your property accomodate outdoor gardening? Or would indoor gardening be better suited for your needs?
- Determine what you want to grow. For example, I learned that with the hybriponic indoor gardening system, I can grow my plants strictly inside my home, grow them year-round, and I can purchase pre-seeded pods of available vegetables to grow, use my own seeds and use them in unseeded pods, or start my seeds using the hybriponic indoor gardening system, and carefully transfer them into soil and place them outside to finish their growth.
-Understand that once the plants begin to grow, they need to be checked regularly.
-Do you plan to take this learned skill and use it for profit? Or would this be used for self-sustaining and as a hobby?
Learning to garden reminds me of Jack Mezirow and his learning theory of Transformative Learning.
Transformative learning theory touches on two basic kinds of learning: Instrumental and Communicative. Instrumental learning includes task-oriented problem-solving, and determination of cause-and-effect. Communicative learning emphasizes how learners communicate the needs, feelings, and desires.
By learning to grow food, adults can use what they have learned to fit their views and experiences of the world. They may want to learn this skill for their own health and survival, or they may see this as an opportunity to enhance their skills and turning the produce into profit, which can provide healthy opportunities within their community.
Rationale
In 2015, my husband and I bought a small hobby farm with 12.5 acres. We slowly incorporated chickens for access to fresh eggs, then we jumped in and bought beef cows, specifically Irish Dexters. We did a lot of research to determine which cows would be best suited for our type of land, and what would be the best size of cow since its only my husband and I. We didn't want to have more than we needed, as we felt this was waste. One of the challenges to having a farm, but also both of us having full-time jobs, is trying to have time to build a garden to grow our food.
I've never been successful with growing food outside, as they always fell victim to the New England weather, or the critters that raid the garden every night. I wanted to learn another way to grow a garden, and learning, using an indoor system, I thought would be beneficial to my needs. I'm hoping that I can grow on what I learned, and expand the methods where I had mentioned earlier, by starting the plants with the indoor system, and then transferring them outside.
Audience
Moving out of the city or urban areas seems to be a more common thing among adults. Adults seeking a lifestyle where they are less dependant on corporations to provide their food, seems to be increasing in demand as well. I think this type of change in lifestyle drives adults to want to learn something new that will be greatly beneficial to their health and well-being.