Francis Wyman Garden, Seeds and Master Gardener Peter Coppola

What's Going on with that Garden Back There?

Room 103 students took a tour of the garden behind the school last week. We saw watermelons, pumpkins, tomatoes, beans and more.  This led to our main purpose, seed drying and classification...along with a short reflection of light energy and color.

Many vegetables are already picked and hopefully eaten, but how do we continue the process?  Did you know that some vegetables from school gardens go to local food pantries? 

Welcome Peter Coppola!

To keep the process going, master gardener Peter Coppola came for a visit with dried bean seeds for us to check out.  How did they become dry?  What can we do with them?  Why do the different seeds look different?  

Next comes a variety of tomatoes like Purple Cherokee and Moon Glow.  We noticed the differences between the different tomatoes.  How do we get these tomatoes  again next year?  Hmm!

Let's cut into the tomatoes and see what we can do. The insides of tomatoes are juicy, wet and filled with seeds.  If we scoop out the seeds and put them into cups we can begin the process of drying the seeds to keep these kinds of tomatoes in our garden for next year.





After digging out the seeds, we put them into water to sort the pulp from the seeds.  Next steps: daily stirring, drying out and seeing the differences in our dried tomato seeds.  Be sure to come back for more!