Getting Down and Dirty

Summer is officially here for Robeson County 4-H.  This is our first week long day camp and the subject this week, Junior Master Gardeners.  For those of you unfamiliar with this program it is a curriculum from Texas A&M University.  The hands on curriculum allows youth to learn about soils, plants, insects, growing and preparing foods, team building and much more.  Our goal when we are done is to have every day camper certified as Junior Master Gardeners.
Today our theme was "Getting Down and Dirty" and we did just that studying everything about soil.  We started the day learning to protect ourselves from the sun making our own recyclable sombreros.  We decorated them and had a fashion show, and it was tough to determine who had made the best chapeau.  Then we learned that newspaper is a very versatile recyclable and is biodegradable (will dissolve back into the soil).  Our youth used wet newspaper to make pots.  Currently their creations are drying and we will finish this project at the end of the week when we take home our own plant in our biodegradable pot.  While we were outside crafting our pots we got to see a beneficial insect up close and personal as it fed on a leaf, and a ground wasp as it was making a home and filling it with food.
  We did take a break from playing in the dirt to do a little team building exercise passing a hula hoop around a closed circle without using our hands.  Just to make it interesting we added a hula hoop after each round until we had 4 hula hoops in the circle and the goal was to make sure they didn't touch each other.  They did a great job getting the job done.
  Before lunch we jumped into composting and started our own vermicomposter.  If you are wondering what that is, it involved worms eating wast food (fruits and veggies) and utilizing their castings to great a nutrient rich soil.  The youth dropped in 120 worms into our composter and then fed the worms leftover salad.  We will check on it tomorrow to see if the worms liked their treat.
  After lunch we hit the fun JMG activities again, learning about composting critters like worms that help lawn clippings, food waste, and soil decompose into a rich soil that will help grow really great food in the future.

Then it was time to dig in and get dirty.  Mr Mack, our Extension Horticulture Agent taught us about all the different parts of soil (he gets upset when we call it dirt), and we did a couple of experiments that will separate the soil we collected outside the Extension Office.  We learned how to collect soil samples and send them to North Carolina Department of Agriculture (NCDA) to be analyzed and let us know how we can make our soil richer in nutrients.  We even reached into a box to feel the difference between clay, sand, and silt.  It was really sort of cool.  Best of all we got to make our own edible soil aggregate by using peanut butter (clay), brown sugar (sand), Marshmallows (silt), pretzels (organic matter), M&M's (water), and gummy worms (worms).  Then we ate it.  It is sort of fun when you are expected to play with your food.
  At the end of the day we played one last game where we interviewed someone we didn't know before.  It was interesting and we introduced them and the new facts about them to the rest of the class.  All of this was rounded off by everyone's favorite 4-H Day camp game, the silent game.
If it sounds like a full day it really was.  We got about 15 different activities under our belts and tomorrow we are leaving early for an adventure that will let us finish even more activities so that we will become nationally certified, Junior Master Gardeners.  How awesome is that?