Attack of the Thistle Enemy

When we went outside today, we had 2 jobs to do. We dead-headed the marigolds and the mums in the front of the school. The marigolds were in the barrel garden and the mums were in the reading garden. Dead-heading means taking off the dead flowers by pinching the stem under the old bloom. Our fingers smell like flowers now. It was pretty easy to dead-head. Then we put on our gloves and started to pick thistle. The thistle had invaded our reading garden! Even when we had our gloves on, the thistle felt prickly when we picked it. They are mean nasty enemies to the plants we want in the garden and our fingers. We made a big difference after we picked all of the thistle out.
We learned about some of the grasses that are planted in the garden. The grasses have "feathery things" on the top of them that are actually their seed pods. When the seeds dry out later this fall, they will fall down and go into the soil. Next year we'll have even more grasses.
We also found a few more interesting things in the garden today, like two different kinds of mushrooms. Mushrooms are good for the earth because they are decomposers. That means they break up dead plant material to make food for the soil. Mushrooms are also called fungus. We also found some white mold growing in the mulch. Mold is another decomposer. Decomposers show up when there's been lots of rain.
There was also a cricket hopping around in there. We found a grub, but we threw him away because he is a pest.