How does your homeschool garden grow?

Have you heard about the 2nd Annual Garden Challenge over at The Homeschool Village? I saw this challenge going on last year and it looked like so much fun. But since we weren't homeschooling yet and we didn't have a garden of any kind we didn't participate. But I did enjoy reading everyone's posts.

Patiently waiting for their seeds to grow.

In March while learning about Dr. Seuss the kids decided they really wanted to plant some flowers this Spring so they could speak for the trees like the Lorax. Since we don't have a back yard our garden is on our balcony. We use various containers like pretty clay pots, plastic hanging baskets and plastic flower boxes that we got at Dollar Tree. We are also using an ice cream pail. We already had some seed packets hiding in the house but the kids wanted to pick out a couple more so Rowyn choose Black Eyed Susans and Gwyn choose Cosmos. We also planted Sunflowers, Wildflowers, a head of Lettace, Tomatoes, Strawberries.

I do NOT have a green thumb. Every time I try to grow something green it dies. I even killed an Aloe plant which is darn near impossible to do. So it will be interesting to see what happens to our first family balcony garden.

Sunflowers: Well the birds had other plans. They keep digging them out of the pots. But after several times of replanting we have some sprouts.

Tomatoes: We had a great start on our tomato plants but one of the kids sat the container too close to the end of the railing a gust of wind knocked it over the side. We started a new pot but I think the birds ate the seeds because they are not coming up yet.

Black Eyed Susans and Cosmos: Both are doing well so far and we have lots of sprouts.

And this week we also added these to our gardening experience:

Mushrooms: We love growing our back to the roots mushroom kits this is the start of our second harvest on this box. These are super easy to grow and they produce mushrooms in about 10 days. You can read my review here.

More Cosmos and Sunflowers: Gwyn won an adorable princess greenhouse on the Miracle-Gro Kids Show Us What You Grow photo contest. She was super excited when the package arrived and planted them right away. There is also a growing tracking chart that came with the kit so she has started keeping track and on day 2 there is one little stem poking through the dirt.

Carrots: We also just started our carrot kit that was given to us while attending the Earth Day festival at our local nature center.

Beans: And we started a fun bean growing experiment. The instructions are here if you want to give it a try. We are on day two of our experiment and one bean is already starting to crack a little exposing what looks to be a stem.

But we don't have any buds yet on our flowers, but we are anxiously waiting. And for some reason the flowers in our hanging baskets are not growing at all.

Link up & share your progress! Did you “break ground” or still growing starter plants?  Are the kids excited, do you see any buds, or are you fighting army worms?