When the Plant Dies

Expect roughly one in five

Some seeds do not germinate. Some seedlings damp off. Something gets eaten. A pot dries out over a long weekend.

If you have not planned for this, a dead plant becomes a small disaster and the teacher quietly replaces it overnight. Do not do that. The replacement teaches nothing and children usually notice.

Plant two per child

The simplest fix in this entire guide. A child with a spare is a child who can lose one and keep going. A child with one and no spare has a bad afternoon and remembers the garden as the place where the sad thing happened.

Turn it into the diagnosis

Why did this one die and that one live. Too little water, too much water, not enough light, something ate it. Those four cover almost everything and children can check each one.

That is a real investigation with a real answer, and it only exists because something died.

Name it honestly

Do not soften it into the plant went to sleep. Children handle plants dying perfectly well when it is stated plainly and unemotionally. What they handle badly is an adult being strange about it.

The compost close

The plant goes in the compost heap, and in six weeks it is soil, and that soil grows the next one. Walking a dead plant to the heap and coming back to it later is the cleanest cycle lesson you will get, and it costs you nothing.