Garden Cookies

Aunt Nancy and Uncle Chris did it again!  They chose a really cool project for Grace's birthday - garden cookies. Through this process we learned that making flowering cookies for your garden is an old farming tradition that originated with the Native Americans. They rolled seeds in clay to protect them from drying out in the sun, getting eaten by birds, or blowing away in the wind.

We started this simple, but messy, project this morning in the sunshine on our deck. The kit came with everything we needed. We just had to add a little water to make the clay/soil mixture.

After you mix the clay, you roll it out and pat the seed mixture into it. They give you three small cookie cutters in the kit, but we had a difficult time separating them from the rest of the clay.  I guess we could have left the shapes there on the rolling mat until it all dried and then we could lift them up. But we decided to just cut our garden cookies with a knife to make little rectangles.

They are drying on the deck now.  We plan to put the seed cookies in two big planters in the sunshine and Grace will water them every day.  The seed mix is supposed to grow flowers that attract butterflies and hummingbirds.  That will be cool!