Special thanks to intern Rebecca Rowell for the following post!
It’s officially summer! The gardening season is in full swing. We’ve moved past tulips, lilacs, and other spring flowers and are well on our way to the glorious colors (and tastes!) of summer in Minnesota. Even the youngest of gardeners—or budding botanists or aspiring arborists—can pick from a great selection of eBooks on the topic of gardening. Here are just few selections from Lerner Digital. In Urban Gardening(2016), Carol Hand highlights the community garden which is growing in popularity. In this gardening book for readers in grades 6–8, we can learn about why such a garden, which includes a school garden, might be a good idea, what it takes to start a community or school garden, and how readers can get involved.
Kari Cornell’s The Nitty-Gritty Gardening Book: Fun Projects for All Seasons (2015) has fun and creative ideas to get kids in grades 4–8 gardening, including indoors. In addition to learning how to grow potatoes and strawberries, readers can get the 4-1-1 on which flowers to plant to attract bees, birds, and butterflies. And there’s no need to wait until spring or summer to get planting. Eager gardeners can even learn how to get daffodils to bloom in winter (yay!).
Dig into the mathematics of gardening by reading Garden Math. This 2016 title by Katie Marsico for readers in grades 3–4 shows how math is everywhere in the garden. Readers will learn how to measure a garden’s perimeter and area, calculate how many flowers will fit in a plot, and predict vegetable growth and harvest dates. It all adds up to a lot of fun!
Spring may be over, but summer has only just begun. There’s still plenty of time to start gardening this season, so get planting!