Over the past several years there have been conversations of adding a children’s garden in the backyard at Kids Cottage. This spring those conversations came to life! Kids Cottage’s learning garden was built and planted with the help of several parents, teachers and of course, the children.
With the help from American Hardscapes and a few volunteers to plan and build the square foot gardens, we successfully used the back portion of our outdoor play area to plant, grow, and nurture a full garden. Parents donated herbs, vegetable seeds and flower seeds to plant in our garden. A stone walkway is situated throughout the gardens. Kids Cottage provided garden rock painting at the annual VegFest this year as part of their garden activities. We just had our first pickings from the garden, which allowed many parents to take home mint, basil and rosemary.
Cadbury of Lewes asked to partner with Kids Cottage along with the Lewes Chamber, The Nature Generation, and Lewes in Bloom for a Monarch butterfly program to establish Official Monarch Way Stations in the area while educating others about the plight of the Monarch. Teachers will be educating our children on the Monarch at Kids Cottage. The Nature Generation donated books, A Place For Butterflies , by Melissa Stewart, for each of the children in our Pre-K classrooms. In addition, Kids Cottage Pre-K students had the opportunity to create and display pictures of the Monarch during the month of June while some participated in a butterfly release at Cadbury on June 22nd.
Each season, the children will help take care of our garden, by watering, picking vegetables, herbs or flowers for home and replenishing our gardens. We are all excited to have our garden to teach, grow and learn. Please, stop by to tour our little gardens and maybe see a butterfly!
