Learn about Plants with the Community Helper for Y

Our Community Helper for Y is (something my husband would like to have) a Yard Keeper! Currently my kids think this would be pretty fun since all they have really experienced of it is riding the lawn mower around with their dad. Of course, our grass is just turning green, so there is not many actual yard keeping activities we can do outside. However, we can grow grass and talk about what seeds need to grow!

While wandering around the store we came upon some cat grass. So, now we can grow some seeds and reward the cats...win, win. 

When I asked the kids what the seeds needed to grow they immediately tell me water and light, so instead of just growing it according to the directions we decided to make it a bit more interesting. 

We grew most of the seeds exactly how the package said, so we would be sure to get some grass, but we also grew some with just water and sunlight and we tried to grow some with just sunlight. You can see the three groups below: 2) soil, water, and light, b) water and light, and c) light. To ensure the water group had enough water we placed them on a wet sponge and made sure to keep a small amount of water in the bottom of the container for the sponge to suck up. 

After a couple days we started to see some growth in the first two groups. We actually had sprouts in the group with soil, and little roots in our water group. 

A few more days, and we have actual grass! The soil group is still doing the best, but there is growth in the water group too. Nothing from the sunlight group, but that is kind of what we expected.

Right before giving it to our cats you can see we had decent growth from the water and light group and excellent growth from the soil group! I didn't even bother with another picture of the only light group as there was no change.

I am betting after this experiment my kids will remember that grass needs water and light, but it also needs the nutrients in the soil to really grow! I wanted to add a pic of my cats with the cat grass, but they decided they could only munch it while we were not in the room (guess they thought it was a bad behavior like munching other plants)!

We may not have learned a lot about keeping the grass trimmed and free of weeds, but we learned what makes it grow! Seems like a good start for future Yard Keepers!