Windowsill Orchard - An Arbor Day Activitiy

For Arbor Day this year we decided to plant a windowsill orchard. I pulled out some of the fruit from the fridge. We ended up with an apple, an orange, a pear, a lemon, and a lime. Of course, the lemon, lime, and orange trees will not thrive here in Montana. They will have to remain house trees, but the others should eventually end up in the yard.

We started this activity by reviewing the creation story, and explaining to the younger children that God made the trees to grow fruit with seeds that produce more of the same kind of tree. Then the children sampled the fruit for a snack, and harvested the seeds. That gave us a visual example for the creation lesson. As we planted the lemon seed, we talked about how it would not produce an apple, or an orange tree, and so on.

We made markers for our pots using craft sticks, and some of the recycled paper from our Earth Day project (it seemed appropriate for today). Since I like to get a multi-lingual aspect into our studies whenever possible, we wrote the fruit names in German.

With the seeds planted, and pots marked, all that was left was to place our orchard into the windowsill, and our Arbor day project was complete.

It's great to be a homeschooler!