Did you know that this week is National Agriculture Week? To celebrate, we will be sharing fun agriculture related challenges this week. Today, is Hands-On Garden Day and we will be learning all about growing beans. Have you ever planted and grown your own beans? It is really fun and easy. You can use either one of the activities below, one is a written tutorial and one is a video.

Bean in a Bottle (National 4-H STEM Lab): This fun activity gives you step-by-step written directions on how to grow beans in an empty water or soda bottle. Due to the “greenhouse effect” created by the bottle design, this experiment shows really fast growth of the plant. Typically, this is a great option if you want to just experiment with one seed.

How Does A Seed Grows (Amazon Book Download): This book teaches younger kids how to grow bean seeds (or other plant seeds) in eggshells. This allows youth to grow twelve seeds at a time. These seeds will grow slower, but could be transplanted to a larger container or a small garden spot for long time growth. In addition to the book linked above, there is also a 16-minute read-aloud of the book prepared by a teacher for her class. You can access it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XBoE_YSANw

Watching a seed grow can be SO MUCH FUN! It can take patience though. While a seed starts growing as soon as it is planted, it can take several days to weeks before it’s growth can be easily seen. This Bean Growth Time-Lapse shows 25 days of growth of a bean plant and is really neat to watch while waiting for your actual plant to grow.

Are you curious how seeds grow? If so, watch this video that tells you all about the parts of a seed and how it grows!

There are also a TON of resources on beans and other legumes available on the Georgia Organics Make Room for Legumes Resource Page. One of my favorite resources are there cool bean recipes. My favorite is the Black Bean Salsa recipe below:

Whether your kids love to eat there veggies or not, they will think that these experiments are cool beans! We encourage you to have your students take a picture of their bean plants as they grow and post them on social media with the hashtags #Tattnall4H and #4HSTEMULATINGLEARNING. We look forward to seeing lots of cool beans. For more details about these activities, please contact us at rbowen1@uga.edu.