One of our Community Club members works on our pig for the 4-H Read-to-Lead booth. She used the grid method to scale up the small drawing to full size. Pretty amazing for a fourth-grader!
We had the opportunity to participate in the Arbor Day ceremony sponsored by the Trenton chapter of Tree City USA. Tree City planted a red dogwood at the Bank of Dade in memory of Edward Wilkie, a former Bank of Dade president. One of our Dade County 4-H Teen Leaders, Kara Wilson, attended the ceremony.
The Davis Elementary 5th grade 4-H club members learned about inherited traits during their meeting. They demonstrated how dominant and recessive traits work by using bees’ knees and glitter. You can talk to a fifth-grader to get more details on that. They also talked about careers available in the information technology field. They learned the difference between hardware and software and talked about the kinds of jobs that deal with each.
The Dade County High School 4-H club began poultry judging practice during club time at the high school. We will have additional practices at the Ag Center after school. The poultry judging competition will be in McDonough in May. Poultry judging includes knowing how to determine egg quality, how to identify chicken parts, and how to rank live birds based on egg-laying performance and potential.
The Dade County 4-H Community Club met last week and began work on our booth for the Read-to-Lead event on March 24. This will be the first year for 4-H to have a booth in this exciting event organized by the Dade County Public Library. The theme for this year is Charlotte’s Web, which takes place on a farm and at a fair, so it is perfect for a 4-H farm-themed booth. Our Community Club 4-H’ers got a good start on making a pig to go with Clover, the 4-H cow, and designing the beanbag apples for the “Feed the Pig” beanbag toss.
Don’t forget to register for the Chicken Project! Any 4-H'er may purchase 10 chicks for $25 to take home and raise. All participants bring back their three best birds to be judged in the Chicken Show in November. Then you get to keep all 10 birds. This year we are purchasing Golden Sexlink chicks. They are considered excellent egg-layers and should be providing you with eggs before Christmas.
Register and pay the $25 fee to the Extension office at the Ag Center by March 16 (that’s next week!). The chicks will arrive in mid-to-late May, so you still have plenty of time to build your coop. Or build a chicken tractor and fertilize your yard for free. A chicken tractor is a portable chicken coop, usually with wheels. It allows you to easily move the coop anywhere, essentially fertilizing your yard one rectangle at a time with chicken manure.
The Gardening Club has already started preparing the raised beds at the Ag Center for spring planting. They cleared out the winter cover crop and planted seeds for the spring growing season. A special thanks to our 4-H volunteer Laurie Carden for leading the gardening activities.
Davis Elementary 4th grade 4-H’ers learned how to lay out their triboards to display their science projects. They will be conducting their experiments at home over the next couple of months. Then they will prepare displays of their experiment results for their Science Fair in May. The fourth-graders also learned about Newton’s Laws of Motion. Law Number Three: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. They discussed how a Newton’s Cradle works and watched demonstrations of all three laws.
Registration has begun for 4-H Cloverleaf Summer Camp. We still have slots left, so if your fourth-, fifth- or sixth-grader is interested in going to camp the week of June 11-15, come by the Extension office at the Ag Center for registration paperwork.
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