Native American Gardening and Wild Foods

Today we had three wonderful kids out to learn how the Native Americans grew gardens and gathered wild plants for food and medicine. We had a lot of fun adventures!

They quickly discovered our many black raspberry bushes...

...and picked them clean!

We then made our way down to the river, where we found lots of great things to observe and collect.

                                      We found one clam...

                                 
                              ...and then another...

                                     
                                        ...and another...

                            
                              ...and the search had begun!

                               

They ended up with eleven clams altogether!


 After lunch, we quickly made our way to the pond, where one of the veteran campers expertly caught some friends for us to look at.

                                (I think his name was Hoppy...)

We then set to work on our Three Sisters Garden where we efficiently planted five mounds of corn.

First we built up a nice mound of dirt. Some of use used tools Native Americans used, such as deer scapule, deer antlers, or clam shells--others just used their hands!

Then we poked holes and pushed in the corn seeds.

Finally, we made sure all the mounds had enough water to start growing.














We made another trip to the river, where we found one of the coolest discoveries of the day... a dead fish!

The kids suggested that we use the fish as a natural fertilizer for the corn by burying it underneath the mound, so that's exactly what we did!

 

                 
                      Now that looks like a happy corn mound!