Another "fruitful" day

Diffendoofer is definitely in session, as are it’s affiliate schools in Fall City, Puyallup and Tacoma. Every Momma I talked to today is marveling at how focussed the kids are this week with their manipulatives and studies. It’s so much fun to watch, and I am thrilled to finally have peers right here in the experience with me.

Today the children worked mostly without me, studying music and reading. We did some math. The project of note today though, is that we planted a “European Herb Garden Kit” from Jiffy. The kids and I love to garden, and it’s horribly out of season, but that in and of itself can be the lesson, can’t it? So now Diffendoofer has a windowsill garden, just as every good classroom should.

The bigger note for me is that the D-meister is becoming, as Montessori would put it, “more peaceful.” Up until now he has been the “not yet peaceful child,” but he’s been allowed that as part of the privilege of being a toddler. I have been really satisfied watching him fold into the family in this new way. Grateful, actually!

First Day of Autumn

Yesterday, that is. Despite feeling like Washington forgot to have a summer, I took the weekend to celebrate the onset of my favorite season accordingly.

Friday night I gleaned the blackberries I could find from our own thicket. It was dusk by the time I got out there, and the blackberries were the same color as the twilight shadow. I am sure I missed a few. Nonetheless, I spent Saturday morning in the kitchen. We made blackberry muffins, lemon squares and pancakes. That afternoon, Paul picked up a crate of apples and I made a huge deep dish apple pie. Sunday, I canned apple butter. We still have about a dozen apples left. I can’t decide whether to use them or let the kids have them. They’ve eaten at least three a piece since Saturday.

Learning how to can has brought an unexpected benefit. If she sees me take food out of the waterbath canner, G will eat it. She despises cinnamon and refused to eat the apple pie, despite it’s sugary goodness. The apple butter however, she tore into, and swears it is the best thing ever. Same apples, same seasoning, NO sugar. Go figure.

Of all the peaches I canned, I only have 4 quarts left.

I need to get a steam canner! She’ll eat like a normal person then!

Big Day

Big, Long, Tiring Day

Where the kids both woke up with different classes (in theater and martial arts) and instructors than they went to bed with. (Thank, you TFM!)

Where we enjoyed tooling around the waterfront in Gig Harbor for no other reason than we wanted to. We just played in the big grassy spaces, the kids climbed trees, and we walked the docks. D-baby notices everything and it was cool watching him discover the growth on the docks. Ever so often he’d stop in his tracks to peer over the edge of the floating dock to see what different kind of seaweed or barnacles was growing down there.

Where I canned my first quarts of peaches and yes, it was easier than I thought and even a little less tedious.

Where I made my third batch of homemade yogurt. I am really digging this, especially since I bumped up organic store bought cultures with bifidus and reuteri. My whole foods nerds will know what that means.

Where for the fourth time in as many weeks, some random stranger said in passing conversation, “my goodness [s]he’s sharp,” about one of our kids. Always those words, always with a vaguely surprised look on their face. Is it a compliment, like I take it when I just smile back?Or do I look like such an idiot that my kids are shockingly non-idiotic?

Autumn Coming, the harvest is in earnest

It’s kind of cool; kind of sad. It’s funny, because I have been waiting impatiently for the things to be big / ripe enough to harvest and now I am sad because it means the garden is winding down.

Our biggest sunflowers are starting to topple, they’re so huge, and some have happily turned to seed, while others are just beginning to flower. The potatoes are dug and we pulled a row of carrots. I should dig up the rest of the onions.
The corn’s not brown enough yet, but the sickly looking zucchini plant has two zukes left and then I think it’s done. Our Hubbard squash are still gigantic and growing, while we have three new acorn squash and two spaghetti squash starting to grow. The tomatoes are continuing to ripen at a snail’s pace, so we’ve been able to just eat them as they come. The green beans are about done, while the pumpkins are just starting to change from green to orange.

I love this picture. Nick, processing carrots, with sunflowers and acorn squash behind him.

Can you believe we still have strawberries ripening?

This is the best garden we’ve ever had. Can’t wait until next year’s summer garden. in the meantime, we’re going to plant greens greens greens for winter!

And she thinks I am taking a picture of carrots.

Sheets in the Garden

I went out there yesterday because the sheets drying in the garden evoked something in me. I remembered my own childhood, and my grandmother’s line drying the clothes next to my grandfather’s garden. Seeing them blowing in the gentle breeze just brought a sense of well-being so full that I wanted to try to capture it.

But I couldn’t.

I tried

and I tried

and I tried

but no matter what I did it just looked like a faded sheet hanging over some tomatoes.

Finally, I abandoned the project and sat with the family to enjoy the sun. Then ~N~ gave me what I didn’t know I needed. Technically, there are a hundred things wrong with this picture, but it captured the feeling I wanted to remember from that day and I love it:

Sunflowers and Home

This bee is on a mission

So loaded down with pollen, she couldn’t walk correctly and continually lost her balance
I think this picture makes her look like she’s on a satin pillow

The strange things you find in sunflower patches

Where’s Waldo? Or should I say G-Ro?

The colors of a northwest summer

Blueberry

~N~ is improving drastically. He spent the entirety of yesterday looking and acting normally. The rapport between the children continued until the evening, when he started being really annoying to his sister, and she finally started screaming back. I noticed then (around supper time) that few hives were returning and his eye was red again. I dosed him with benadryl, and proof positive that the reaction is abating in total, he went to sleep quickly. I have noticed in massive reactions like this, the benadryl doesn’t help them sleep if it’s so busy fighting the hives.

Speaking of ~N~, who I call “Blueberry” after his pretty eyes, we spent some time yesterday at the Blueberry farm. It made for an odd Lunch-with-friends because we neither lunched nor spent much time with them, but we saw TheGreenMama and B and barely missed Mackattack. Blueberries rock, man. We all decided we had to stock for the winter, like NOW. As far as I know we all plan to go back as well. (I am musing now whether I should just pack the car while the children sleep so we can get it out of the way.)

The children were extremely excited to go berry picking, and they refused to believe I meant another farm besides Terry’s. We would have left an hour earlier had they not been making arts and crafts projects to give their favorite farmer. Unfortunately as we entered Puyallup, they both realized they’d left them.

After the farm, where we picked 6 pounds of blueberries together, G spent the afternoon making bendie people for their castle and treehouse. They took this class from the Freelance Mama one year ago on an MDC campout–One YEAR!– and have shown little interest in it since. Now G cranked out 7 of them in three hours, very specific to the pattern FM showed them. Kids and their minds amaze me. She made an entire cast of little people based on a story she had written in her head about a farmer and his son who turned out to be a uper hero. She then had to create a supervillain, of course.

Gardening in the rain

It’s been raining pretty well for two days. I am quite happy about that. I love rain, especially when it is not cold and I know it won’t stretch for 2 months straight.

I picked up two flag hangers yesterday for 1.74 each so I finally hung our dolphin garden flag out in the garden. We’ve had it for at least 8 years, but it has always hung inside, in the kitchen. I hung another flower flag in the back. I love garden flags but they have never seemed worth the expense. No way would I actually spend even 7 dollars for wire to hang in the garden. 2.00, I can do that.

While out to install the flags, I got distracted by the fruits in the garden. The squash are filling out, the Romano beans are at least 4 inches but thin, and the Molbaks tomato plants are going nuts. I thinned the inner branches on the tomatoes and tied some more to the higher stakes. Niki’s seedlings are starting to flower and they have thick, strong central stalks. Our zucchini, quarantined in the currently underused “winter” garden, has little baby zukes on board. It’s a good time for the garden, where everything is full of promise but nothing has gone so haywire that it’s unusable or too much work.

My assessment at this point is that we have a good kitchen garden, but it’s definitely not at replace-the-CSA level yet. It will be full complement, come August and September, but for right now all I am getting is greens and some berries. It’s nowhere near canning level at all. The blackberries will give us an incredible yield, and next year we should have a good crop of strawberries. This year, though, is already five times the crop we got last year so we are satisfied.

Next steps:

finding a place for the blueberry bed
obtaining chickens and a place to put them
building the creative greenhouse with Niki and putting it to use

I talked to a squishy baby last night who liked to smile at me.

Not a farm, but it’s ours

This is the back plot of the garden. In the background you can see the blackberry hedges. In this garden bed we have corn, onions, Romano bush beans, cauliflower, spaghetti squash varietal, jalepeno, cilantro, purple cabbage, carrots, tomatoes, swiss chard, bok choy, cucumbers, some squash I bought but don’t remember, blue lake climbing beans, and potatoes.

The blueberries, strawberries and herbs are in separate gardens not pictured here, as are the zucchini, artichokes, Brussels sprouts and sunflowers.

This is a bad picture, but a great shot. I like how the garden frames my family at play.

Knee-high by the 4th of July

That’s how tall the corn is supposed to be, said P-daddy’s step-daddy from Michigan. I have never planted corn before so I had no hope of it actually working out that way. By the end of June, the little stalks were, well, little. But darn-tootin’ if it didn’t so happen that by the 4th of July, they were even as tall as Niki’s dh’s knee. Very cool! The sunflowers are already as tall as the kids, and the fruit trees we planted in early spring are now over 7 feet tall.

We had a little tent city going on for the 4th, where the C-family and the Mack family came to celebrate the beach fireworks. Unfortunately, it was a blisteringly hot 4th and by the time they arrived, I’d been cooking in an 85 degree kitchen and was embarrassingly cranky. My friends are good friends, however, and they forgave me; we went on to have a nice time.

The tide was too high this year for us to repeat last year’s sprawl, especially with three times the people, so we settled for perching on the rock wall. Unfortunately this unduly confined the toddlers and by the time the best of the rockets were going off, they wanted none of it. They revolted so most of our party left early, but I stayed behind with Niki’s dh and one big kid from each family to enjoy the big show. I kept chanting for Gandalf’s dragon, while Mack’s older son kept telling me it didn’t exist! That gave me my opening for the quote of the day, where I said “Nonsense! There haven’t been dragons around these parts for years…..” but I deviated to finish with “there might be one any day!”

Sitting with G on the blanket, watching the explosions reflect in her eyes, made the entire endeavor worth it for me. She sat there, face glowing in the night, with an expectant smile on her open face which broadened with every sparkling detonation.

On July 5th, the Mommies plotted against the nine children we had collected together in an attempt to wear them out. We fed them a carb-heavy breakfast, led by chocolate chip cookies, and then took them on a small hike before leading them down to the sunny-hot beach where most of them actually swam (in Puget Sound. The very idea makes me shiver). We finished them off with a sprinkler fest in the back yard with chilled leftovers from our cook-out the day before. There’s something awe-inspiring to me about a 5 year old gnawing on a cold BBQ rib bone.

Has summer finally arrived????