For Rowan ⭐
Activities and things to look for in the garden — sized for Rowan.
Hi Rowan! 🌟
This is a page just for you. The garden has lots of things to discover.
🌅 Best garden time
Pflugerville gets very hot in the daytime in summer — too hot to play outside for long. So the best garden time is morning, before breakfast or right after. The sun isn't strong yet, the soil is cool, and the bees are just waking up. After dinner, when the sun is going down, is also a good time.
🌱 Your plant
When we plant the garden, pick one plant to be your special plant. You'll be in charge of saying hello to it, checking on it, and watching it grow. Some good ones for a Rowan plant:
- A basil plant — smells amazing when you rub a leaf. We can use your basil in pizza and pasta.
- A marigold — bright orange or yellow flowers. Pretty to look at and they help the tomatoes by keeping bad bugs away.
- A nasturtium — you can eat the flowers! They taste a little spicy like pepper.
You and Mama can pick together at the nursery.
🌿 Kid jobs in the garden
A little watering can with a sprinkle spout is perfect. You can give your plant a drink in the morning. Not too much — just enough to make the soil look dark.
Take a walk around the bed and squeeze a basil leaf between your fingers, then smell. Then a parsley leaf. Then a marigold flower. Each one is different! Some smell like soap, some smell like pizza, some smell like spice.
(Don't pick the leaves — just rub them gently. The smell sticks to your fingers.)
Look closely at the leaves. Can you find:
- 🐞 A ladybug? (Red with black spots — they're friends, they eat bad bugs)
- 🦋 A butterfly?
- 🐝 A bee or bumblebee? (They make flowers turn into fruit)
- 🐛 A green caterpillar with white stripes? (Tell Mama or Dada — that's a hornworm, and they eat too many tomato leaves!)
When tomatoes get red and squishy-but-not-too-squishy, they're ready to pick. You can twist them gently off the vine. Cherokee Purple tomatoes are a special kind that turns dusky purple-red, not bright red.
When blackberries are shiny black (not red, not purple), they're ready. They should fall off when you barely touch them. If you have to tug, leave it for tomorrow.
Don't pick the jalapeños without a grown-up. They have a special spice that makes hands sting if you rub your eyes.
🦋 Cool things to watch for
- 🌱 The sproutlings stretching: when we plant the tomato babies, you can watch them get bigger every single day for the first two weeks.
- 🌸 The first flower: tomato flowers are tiny and yellow. Each flower can turn into a tomato.
- 🟢 The first baby tomato: it'll be tiny and green at first. Then it grows.
- 🍅 The big color change: tomatoes start green, turn pink, then purple-red.
- 🌻 The sunflowers: we planted seeds across the yard. They will grow TALLER THAN YOU. Maybe taller than Mama and Dada! Their flowers face the sun all day long.
- 🍂 The mulch: the soil cover is wood chips and it smells like a forest.
- 🐕 Where Lulee can and can't go: Lulee is a friend of the garden but the plants aren't her snack. We help her remember.
🐕 Lulee + the garden
Some plants are not good for dogs to eat. The tomato leaves (the green parts) aren't good for Lulee. The jalapeño plant isn't good for her either. We picked all the other plants to be Lulee-friendly — basil, parsley, marigolds, and nasturtium are all OK if she sniffs them.
But the best rule: Lulee doesn't eat plants from the garden. We help her remember by walking her around the bed, not letting her into it.
📖 Rowan's garden words
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Sproutling | A baby plant, smaller than your hand |
| Companion | A plant that helps another plant grow better |
| Pollinator | A bug that helps flowers turn into fruit (bees!) |
| Mulch | The wood-chip blanket on top of the soil that keeps it cool |
| Trellis | The tall fence the tomato vines climb up |
| Harvest | Picking the food when it's ready |
| Ripe | When a fruit is ready to eat |
| Bolt | When an herb gets too hot and makes flowers instead of leaves |
| Trap crop | A plant we put far away to keep bad bugs busy — so they leave our tomatoes alone |
🌱 Seeds in the house!
In August it is still too hot outside for some seeds. So we start them indoors, in little trays under a light, like a tiny plant nursery. You can help.
Here is the fun part: you check them every morning. For days there is nothing, nothing, nothing — and then one morning a tiny green loop pokes up out of the dirt. That is the plant standing up for the very first time.
When they are big enough, in September, we carry them outside and plant them in the garden. You will have grown them from the very beginning.
🍂 Coming in fall
When the weather gets cooler in September, we'll plant more things:
- Cilantro — Mama loves this one. It tastes like fresh tortillas.
- Lettuce — for salads
- Snow peas — sweet and crunchy, you eat them whole, pod and all
- Broccoli — little green trees
- Purple-hull peas — these grow inside a pod, and popping the pod open to get the peas out is one of the best jobs there is
- A butternut squash — it grows on a long vine along the ground and gets HEAVY. Ours should be ready around November.
- Carrots — these go in later, when it's cold outside. You can help pull them up when they're ready.
Fall is when the garden is really happy in Pflugerville.
🌼 The bluebonnet job
At the end of August we sprinkle bluebonnet seeds — the Texas flower. Here's the trick: nothing happens for a long, long time. They sleep all winter under the ground.
Then in the spring they come up blue everywhere, and you will know that you put them there.