Here's a date to circle on the homeschool calendar: according to the National Weather Service in Little Rock, the average first fall frost at Little Rock is October 31, and the average first freeze is November 10. In northern and western Arkansas, including the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains, freezes typically show up by the last week of October. In other words, right now.
That sounds like the end of gardening season, but Arkansas gardeners know better. The University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension October garden guide lists spinach, lettuce, mustard greens, turnips, collards, leeks, shallots and garlic as crops to plant this month. It also suggests raking leaves to use as mulch or compost.
So this week is a great time to turn frost itself into a science experiment: will a simple cover keep baby greens warmer on a cold Arkansas night? Your kids get to find out with real thermometers and real plants.
What your kids will learn
Grades K–5
- What plants need to grow: sunlight, water, soil and space
- What frost is, and why some plants handle cold better than others
- How a seed sprouts into roots, stems and leaves
- Reading a thermometer and recording numbers on a chart
Grades 6–12
- Heat transfer: how covers and mulch slow the loss of heat from soil at night
- Controlled experiments: one variable (the cover), everything else the same
- Germination, transplanting and the plant life cycle
- Calculating garden bed area and volume, then graphing temperature data over time
This week's activity: the frost blanket experiment
You can do this in any garden bed, or in two big pots on the porch.
- Make two matching plots. Divide a bed in half, or fill two large containers with the same soil. Label them "Covered" and "Uncovered."
- Sow cool-season seeds. Plant the same seeds in both plots, the same depth and spacing. Spinach or lettuce works well. A ruler helps young kids space seeds evenly.
- Add leaf mulch. Rake a few fallen leaves, crumble or shred them, and tuck a thin layer around (not on top of) the seed rows in both plots.
- Set up thermometers. Push a simple outdoor thermometer into the soil of each plot, or set one at soil level in each.
- Cover one plot on cold nights. When the forecast drops near freezing, drape an old bedsheet or frost cloth over the "Covered" plot in the evening. An adult should help anchor it with bricks or rocks. Take it off in the morning.
- Read and record. First thing each morning, write down both temperatures and look for frost on the leaves or soil. Older kids can graph the difference.
- Compare growth. After two to three weeks, count sprouts and measure leaves in each plot. Did the cover make a difference?
Make it a full garden course with the kit. The Raised Garden Bed Plant Science Kit gives your kids their own outdoor lab: a 6 × 3 × 1 ft galvanized steel raised bed, five 3-inch peat pots with soil for starting seeds, and five different seed varieties. Kids start seeds indoors, transplant them to the bed, and record growth from seed to harvest. One honest note: the included soil is for the peat pots, and filling the full bed takes about 18 cubic feet of garden soil, so plan a trip to the garden center.
The kit includes five lessons for your grade band (K–5 or 6–12) plus worksheets: a garden planning map, a germination and growth tracking chart, and a results reflection or lab report template with a graph. Building the bed this fall means it's settled, mulched and ready, and your kids can keep using it season after season.
Want lots of cool-season seeds for the experiment? The Heirloom Vegetable Seed Science Collection has 30 heirloom varieties and about 5,000 seeds, including Long Standing Spinach and Mixed Green Lettuce, with its own curriculum on germination trials and heredity.
Join the growing community
Every kit comes with an invitation to Aardvark's Seed Planting For Little Hands, our private group for kids and families using our kits. Post your morning thermometer readings, share photos of the first sprouts and ask questions when something looks off. Young growers in Arkansas, West Virginia and Arizona are all experimenting right now, and it's fun to see how a frosty Ozark morning compares to a mild desert one.
Get your garden lab growing
Frost season is starting. Give your kids a garden they can study all year.
