Blossoming Beginning: Starting My Gardening Learning Project

Welcome to my learning project blog! It has taken me a while to decide on what exactly I wanted to learn for this project. I found myself torn between learning sign language – as this would be super beneficial as a future educator – delving deeper into my cooking abilities or exploring the art of gardening. As I processed all three of these, I finally made up my mind and have decided to explore the world of gardening!

Growing up on a farm, I was constantly surrounded by my moms beautiful flower pots and our family garden. My mom has a passion for gardening and planting flowers, so this is what inspired me to take on the task of learning how to properly garden for this project. I shared a picture on the right of my Mom’s garden at the beginning stages. Everything looks so green and healthy in this photo. She plants a huge garden every year and it always impresses me on how she always keeps it weeded and healthy all the time. Now that I live in Regina, with my very own garden box (the picture on the left) and array of flower pots, I’m eager to delve into the intricacies of proper gardening techniques!

To begin my learning project, I have begun immersing myself into online resources to build a foundation of gardening knowledge. Delving into the the media I found a course on a website called Thrive. This is going to be the course I plan on using to guide my gardening journey. It has two free courses, a Growing Food Course and a Healthy Eating Course. By the end of the semester it will be my goal to have finished both of the courses and see if they were beneficial to my learning process. As I can not share the link to the courses as it is under my own account, it will be my plan to share screenshots of the percentage of my learning. I have begun the Growing Food Course and watched the videos up to the directions of getting your soil ready as this is what my first task will be! My next blog post will be all about my process of getting started.

The 3 stages of gardening that I will be focusing on:

1. Preparing the bed
2. Planting
3. Maintenance

In addition to acquiring practical gardening skills, I’m excited to explore the numerous benefits that gardening offers. I am going to be following Why Gardening is Good for the Soul as a guide to see if gardening actually makes me feel these things. Some of the things gardening can help with is being a mood booster, promoting sleep and building strength. To finish off my beginning stages of learning everything about the garden I watched the video below about the 7 health benefits to growing food at home. She talks about the way we get fresh air and vitamin D, it disconnects us from technology and benefits our healthy eating. I have now subscribed to Embracing Harvest on YouTube and I plan to watch more of her videos throughout my learning journey!

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Plan Before Next Blog:

1. Use the Thrive course to help guide me on getting my soil ready in the garden box
2. Do some research on what kind of seeds to plant
3. Reflection on the process so far

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I hope you enjoyed reading my introduction to my learning project, I am so excited to see the improvement on my skills of gardening throughout this course!