Quick Kid Project

                                While we are on vacation, I'm going to rerun a few old posts. 

The Sewing Calendar giveaway will be open all week.

Saturday, Skippy was looking through a past issue of Boys’ Life magazine, and found a project he wanted to try. It used a two-liter bottle to make a self-watering planter. I don’t work well spur-of-the-moment, and started to put him off, as usual (“we don’t have an empty bottle, we’ll have to wait….”). Which usually means they keep asking me for three weeks, until I finally pull it together.

This time, however, Skippy was ready. He had a 16 oz water bottle, which he was sure would work just fine. I started to question whether or not we had any plants or seeds…until Craig said he had some grass seed. Which reminded me that I still had some wheat berries from back in the spring when I grew wheatgrass.
It was so quick and satisfying then, that I knew it would be perfect for a kid.



1. Cut the top off the bottle.

2. Have an adult drill a hole in the cap, and thread a string through it.

3. Fill the top with potting soil around the string.

4. Put water in the bottom half, and invert the top to sit inside of it, with the string in the water, working as a wick.

5. Cover the soil with wheat berries. At this point, I misted the top of the soil with water, but we haven't watered it since, except to refill the bottom once.

Sunday morning it had sprouted. That’s overnight, people! Yesterday we noticed that it was growing so fast that we decided to put in a little measuring stick.



Skippy took a craft stick and marked it with lines and numbers (not actual units of measurement). When we inserted the stick yesterday afternoon, the tallest blade was at 4. Last night it was at 7. This morning, it was at 9. Also, the white stringy things in the dirt are the roots; it’s kind of cool that you can see them.
This was easy to put together, and it grows so fast your child won’t have time to get impatient. Educational summer fun !