Living Root Garden School • Plants & How They Grow • Name: ______________________
🔍 The Case
The case of the pizza that started as seeds — four plants, one bed, and dinner at the end. Can you grow a whole pizza?
Meet the dream team. Tomato is the diva: full sun, 6 to 8 hours a day, tons of water, and more personal space than any other plant — each one needs a 2-by-2 block of squares in the bed. Cherry tomatoes are the friendliest choice for a first pizza garden.
Basil is the speedster: it grows fast, smells like an Italian restaurant, and has one weird rule — pinch off its flowers. The second basil starts flowering, it stops making tasty leaves and puts all its energy into seeds instead.
Pepper is the slowpoke: it wakes up more slowly than everything else and takes its sweet time making fruit, but a homegrown pepper is crunchier and sweeter than anything from a store shelf. Oregano is the survivor: once it is established it barely needs you, handles heat and dry spells, and comes back year after year.
Rule out the lookalikes: crowded plants are not sharing — they are competing for the same sunlight, water, and nutrients, and everybody loses. Space is not empty. Space is an ingredient.
Ask: If you plant a tomato, basil, a pepper, and oregano in one bed, which one will need the most room — and which one will be ready to pick first? Write your guess before you plan.
Try: Plan your pizza bed on paper — one square per square foot, tomato gets a 2-by-2 block — then grow one herb on a sunny windowsill and tend it to harvest, pinching off any flowers.
Stretch (Teens & Growers ready for more): Budget the whole bed: area, spacing, seed costs, and a timeline from sowing to first pizza.
Tell: Fill in the log below — date, what you planted, what sprouted first — then finish this sentence in words or a labeled drawing: “My pizza garden grew ___ because ___.”
Date
What I saw
What surprised me
Date: ____/____/____
Date: ____/____/____
Date: ____/____/____
Date: ____/____/____
🛠️ Build It
Draw your pizza garden bed from above, like a map — every plant in its place, your windowsill herb in a sunny corner.
🗣️ Be the Teacher
Tell someone the four pizza plants and what each one needs to grow — in your own words.
🏅 I can…
☐ I can plan a pizza garden bed.
Portfolio check
☐ Guide read
☐ Case solved
☐ Ask, Try, Tell done
☐ Build It filed: Bed plan + herb log
☐ Taught someone
☐ Badge earned: I can plan a pizza garden bed.
Living Root Garden School • livingrootgarden.com/homeschool/ • Free — print as many copies as you like. File this sheet with your portfolio log. Sprouts do the Read, the Case, and Build It; Growers try the Ask, Try, Tell stretch when ready; Teens do the whole packet — including teaching it back.