Planting a Mystery Garden

 This science experiment started innocently enough. All I wanted was to irritate my husband. Honestly, it doesn't take that much. You see, we have a garden in our backyard. My husband has built 40 raised garden beds for his gardening projects. Tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, squash, zucchini, lettuce, berries, you name it and my husband grows it!

Here are some pictures from last year's garden:

My husband is showing my mom the garden.

Here's my daughter showing off her sunflowers.

This year, wonder of wonders, my husband has allowed me to have one garden bed. That's right. Out of 40, he has allowed me 1. How gracious of him.

Now my hubby is completely OCD when it comes to his garden. Every bed is planned out to perfection and each seed is given it's time to germinate on our growing table before being planted in it's garden home. What could I do to shake him up a bit?

I could find a seed so obscure that it would throw him into a tizzy! So, I went online and found this site:

Bountiful Gardens!

Not only to they specialize in seeds of all kinds, all the seeds are heirloom, which means you can harvest the seeds from the plants you grow to use the next season! Score!

So  I went to the Seed Mixes section and found the PERFECT mix of seeds for my evil plan... the KID MIX! It's a random mix of seeds from the previous season- in other words, you don't know what you're going to get! Veggies, fruits, or flowers? Who knows!? And what could be more annoying to an OCD gardener than having a mystery garden?!

The best part is that the seed packets are so cheap- just 50 cents! I bought 4 packets. I wanted my (personal) kids to get in on the action, and I wanted to share the fun with my students as well.

The Mystery Garden

I let my students in on my evil gardening plan and they thought it was hilarious. When I told them I wanted us to plant some mystery seeds, they were thrilled! We started by watching a short Curious George video called Seed Trouble. 

It's about George having to sort seeds using their attributes- size, shape, color. I wanted my students to have to do the same thing. I gave each team a small amount of seeds from one of the seed packets. (there were a ton of seeds in that packet!) They were to examine the seeds and sort them into groups according to their attributes. Once they were sorted, my students had to label them as being vegetable, fruit, or flower seeds.

After sorting, students chose 4 seeds (of the same kind) and came to my table. Last season I made a binder of all the different seeds my husband used in his garden. My students used the binder to see if they could identify their seeds.

It took me 2 hours, but the binder is worth it! Do you know my crazy husband had 14 types of tomatoes?

 Showing off the seeds they chose

 Going through the binder to guess what they have

 They labeled their cup with their name and their guess 

Time to plant! Dirt, seed, more dirt, water!

Only time will tell what our mystery garden will grow! Some of the seeds were easy to label since I had some matching seeds in my binder. However, the seed mix was so extensive, we have some seeds planted that we couldn't identify! A true mystery!