My mom showed me how to use math while we garden. First we measured our plot, 6 feet by 8 feet. Then I told mom the perimeter, which is 28 feet. Then mom showed me how to make a graph to see how many plants we could fit in our little garden. Some vegetables like broccoli, need their own square foot of space. Other vegetables, like carrot seeds, have to be planted to a certain deepness in the soil. No more than a half inch. Then my mom and I use a ruler to make sure that the seedlings are thinned to 2 inches apart. That makes me sad to thin our garden. I hide the things we pull by the back deck for the baby woodchucks to eat.

When all of the plants and seeds are in the ground, my mom shows me how to fertilize. We put one tablespoon of fertilizer into our 2 gallon watering can. My mom asks me to count how many gallons of water we will need if all the broccoli needs one can. (8 - because we have 4 broccoli plants and each plant gets 2 gallons of water!) Later in the summer, I will just use the hose, but now, we are very careful. My mom asks me a lot of questions, like this one. If we plant 3 pumpkin seeds in a pot and 2/3rds of them die, how many will make it? One. That is exactly what happened. Even at the gardening center, my mom asks me - if we have $30, how many plants can we buy? I have to use addition to see if we have enough money. We don�t, so I put back some big plants and buy smaller seedlings. My mom says to buy only 3 basil plants because she only has 3 pots on the deck, but the pack of plants is 6. What do we do? I ask mom if we can put 2 plants in each pot. 2x3=6. That works for mom!

I love gardening and math and my mom too.