Growing Goodness

A month or so ago I read a piece about making a list of the top five things you want your child to learn.
This doesn't necessarily mean 'math/science/history', though not dis-counting those, but can also entail morals and values that are strong in your family.
It's harder than you think. There are so many things  you want your kids to experience, it's hard to narrow it down to only the top 5, especially when you drop the barrier between 'school subjects' and 'life lessons'.
While I have not narrowed down my list whatsoever, the one solid point, that I actually got from the original piece I read, was that I was my kids to know how to grow and prepare their own food.

At first you think, ok sure, how hard is it to stick a seed in the ground? You trying to turn them into a chef with all this kitchen mumbo-jumbo?

Maybe to some it sounds less important than knowing how to manage finances, or memorize the periodic table.

But someday, and I think we're seeing hints of this already, it's not going to be easy to find good, safe food in our grocery stores, if at all.

I was brought up living next door to my Opa, whose entire life has been agriculture. He tended kilometers of tomato greenhouses when he lived in Holland, and even ended up looking after his brother's gardening jobs when they skipped out to go swimming. When he moved to Canada all he knew how to do was farm and moved across the country earning money at what he did best. For years he worked on the Holland Marsh here in Ontario, and has become one of the provinces foremost experts on carrot and onion crops.
This spilled over into home-life where we would grow over an acre of experimental vegetable varieties each year that had to be kept in top shape in order for the trials to be worth it.
In his 'retirement' we still manage almost as much garden space, but mostly 'personal' experiments now with some new variety of potato or another.
I wasn't in the garden much when I was little. But I still watched. And Toby has a drive to just dig, so we were given our own plot when he was young. I knew a lot from watching, but still learned a lot.
Keep your rows straight so the irrigation hose doesn't have to jog.
Keep your rows even so raking and weeding the paths is easier.
Keep the dirt on the paths loose to prevent weed growth and not trap the vegetables in the ground.
Label everything.
Keep track of the day you plant every year.
When the food is ripe, pick it every day.

This style of farming may sound daunting. And I'd be lying if i said it wasn't.
Sometimes I wish I didn't know what I know so I didn't have to be so picky.
But the truth is, it works. Nothing fails. Everything tastes good.

This is what I want my kids to learn. I want them to know what real food is. I want them to know where food comes from so they understand how much work it must take to fill the shelves of a grocery store. ALL the grocery stores. I want them to be able to feed themselves and their neighbours if there is a food catastrophe some day. I want them to know that cooking is not terrifying. I want math lessons based on kitchen measures and garden hose lengths. I want them to grow good things as they 'grow good' themselves. I want them to know what sharing goodness feels like.

I wanted to have a booth at the farmer's market this year, but in the end decided it wasn't the right thing for us. What we're planning to do instead is be 'open' here saturday and sunday mornings with fresh produce and snacks and my sewing projects waiting at the end of the lane. Ideally we would have started already, but life has a way of getting away on you. In the next few weeks we hope to be back on track, and I hope that those in the area can come say hi :)

Easter and Earth Day

It seems the monotony of the last month has caught up to us... or maybe it's because the snow's gone... but the last few days have been packed full of activities.

We don't usually do much for Easter. We used to decorate eggs like crazy when I was younger and we've dried them and kept them because some of them are pretty outstanding, but because Toby is allergic to eggs I've never really pushed the egg decorating thing.

This year though, he's old enough to look at it as an art project and not just as something he's left out of eating.

First of all he reminded me that we bought baby animal cookie cutters to make Easter cookies, so we did that. He keeps staring at these photos of ornate cookies and lamenting that we never put icing on ours, so we decided to paint-ice these ones.

A lesson in colour mixing before we begin.

Our masterpieces.

After our eatable eggs were painted, we coloured our real eggs.

Toby's first time dying Easter eggs.

I wanted to use natural dyes, but didn't plan ahead on this one at all so I scrounged together what I had. I found some frozen blueberries that we used for blue/purple, we used tumeric for yellow, and I tried to used some leftover artichoke water for green, but when you mixed in the vinegar (to act as a fixative on the eggs) it turned a horrible shade of apple juice.... so we used green food dye for green...

Ended up looking pretty good!

(Toby's favourite colour is green, can you tell?)

I hard boiled the eggs, foreseeing one being dropped, which it did. Toby was mortified, but I said it was ok because we could do something cool with it.

This Martha Stewart Spiderweb Eggs idea is in a book I have, so we tried it.
You're supposed to cook the eggs with the blueberries, so ours wasn't as dark, but still cool!

Because we used vinegar in the egg dye, Toby eventually piped up "Isn't vinegar supposed to explode or something when you put stuff in it?"
I confirmed that he meant baking soda, so we experimented with the leftover dye and a big bowl of baking soda.

SCIENCE!

The reason I've included Earth Day in this post is because Toby, knowing that the eggs we did would need to be broken so we could eat them before they went bad, still didn't want to get rid of the shells.
I said they're hard to take off in one piece when they're boiled.
He said he knew that, but maybe we could make an art project out of them instead of throwing them out.

So today he drew a picture of the Earth and we made an egg shell mosaic.

Our Earth Day  activities also included a clean up of the road in front of our house and discussions about littering and looking after the planet.
We thought we'd maybe wander around and get a couple grocery bags of trash, but we ended up with 6 grocery bags, plus three garbage bags we found in a ravine and a bucket full of dried cement. GROSS PEOPLE.

Happy Earth day everyone!

Today I saw...

Everyday Toby and see some pretty cool things either through the window or on adventures outside. I find I often take these things for granted because "it's just where we live".
Every day several of our conversations start with "Hey, did you see the____?" or "Wow, I found a_____!" or "Look the _____ is back!"
Today I decided to actually record everything we saw and heard.

Today I heard:
Several Field Crickets
2 Cicadas
2 chickadees
3 Toby sneezes
1 Granny sneeze
2 Catbirds
Various other calling birds
Leaves rustling
Trucks on the road
Airplanes flying over

Today I saw:
1 earwig
3 ants
4 houseflies
6 honey bees
10 bumble bees
16 mating Japanese beetles
2 female Hummingbirds
1 male Hummingbird
1 weird hornet thing
4 paper wasps
1 large field cricket
1 baby field cricket
1 small airplane
1 helicopter
5 cabbage butterflies
1 Turkey Vulture
2 dueling spiders
1 hover fly
8 mosquitos
1 White Admiral
1 Silvery Blue butterfly
1 Mourning Cloak
2 fruit flies
1 Wren
1 Catbird
2 micro toads
1 Harvester (Daddy Long legs)
2 worms
2 millipedes
An assortment of tiny un-identifiable moths
6 spider webs
1 Skipper
28 Milkweed Tussok moth larvae
6 Turkey feathers
1 very active almost-5-year-old

Positive Party #5

At least I think this is #5...

Why A Long Winter Can Be A Good Thing

1. When the world warms up too early, plants and animals get fooled into thinking that it's time to wake up and grow. 90% of the time it snows on April Fools Day (Mother Natures little joke, I always say) , it has snowed on Mother's Day before, and it's usually cold again with risk of frost at the end of May for a few nights.
If flowers bloom before mid April, they will most likely be killed by frost, and be 'done for the season'. There was an apple shortage last year for that reason.

2. Early spring can mean a short maple syrup season. Sap only flows when it's warm, but needs the cold nights for the trees to build it up again. If it just gets warm and stays warm, the trees drain in a few days and there's a syrup shortage.

3. When the weather's warm it's hard to wait til the end of may to plant the garden, but doing so earlier can result in damaged seeds and plants in the weather freezes again, which it tends to do here in Canada.

4. A late slow melting period helps keep the ground moist which helps your grass and garden plants last longer. When the snow melts too early and too fast the moisture in the ground drains or evaporates quickly

Spring is coming, but don't make it rush!

March 18 2012. Still technically winter. 22C. BBQ and t-shirts in the porch.

The year the garden died, the yard died, the apple blossoms died, and the summer was the hottest on record.

A Day in the Life

Today:

-Baths (though didn't think to photo document that early in the morning)

-Fulfull request to make play dough, even though we made some yesterday and we haven't had breakfast.

-Finally, Toby's breakfast

 -Tv snack an hour later

 -Serious construction business 

-Leftover soup for lunch

-Venturing into the frigid blindingness of the day

                                 

-Grumpy cat 1

 -Grumpy cat 2

-Shoveling the path with the smallest shovel in the entrance way....

-Icicle snack

 - Shoveling off the deck

 - Snow swinging

 -Grumpy cat 3

 - Mood stomp back to the house after mom dared to suggest that the flying saucer path was getting too slippery to be starting from the very tip top of the hill since mom just crashed into the fence and really hurt her elbow. 

-Releasing grump on play dough pile (though NOT the batch that mom was requested to make a few hours before) while mom does dishes.

 -Making chocolate pudding

-Popcorn snack and TV break...

 -To watch Best Recipes Ever..

-And Stefano Faita

-Making an Olympic sport out of slide bumping down the stairs

 -Dinner, with a side of traffic jam.

-Pasta crab salad!

-Reading with Grampa.....and mom slips away to hide....

Wordless Wednesday

Ode to an Outdoor Kid

Bruises, bruises everywhere.
Muddy face and messy hair.
Blackfly bites and thicket scrapes,
Open wooden garden gates.
Sandy feet under sprinkler hose,
Wipe the droplets off your nose.
Beginning glow of sun-kissed skin.
Slimy mud to throw stones in.
Rubber balls and hula hoops,
Plastic buckets, sandbox scoops.
Bird's eggs, toads and millipedes.
Picking flowers, sowing seeds.
Chase the cat with shrieks and laughs.
Trip and stumble on the path.
Bare feet tear through grassy lawn
Til at last the tell-tale yawn
Of energy that's wearing thin,
A sign it's time to head on in.
Soapy scrubbing, towel dry.
Crawl in bed to close your eyes.

The Definition of Amazing

I'm the type of person/mother that constantly has a camera glued to their right hand (I was going to say glued to their face, but that reference seems a bit archaic now), so naturally Toby has had his curiosity piqued as to what that 'thing' is that Mom is so protective of. About a year ago he took great delight in being allowed to push the arrow buttons to see all the photos I've taken. About half a year ago he started to ask to hold the camera and take a picture. I let him take a few blurry pictures of garden dirt before declaring that the 'batteries needed to sleep for a bit so let's tuck the camera back in the bag.'

Now he's taken to sitting on the couch while I'm busy in the kitchen and take my camera out of the bag and turn it over and over trying to figure out how to turn it on.

I've been wanting to get him a kid's camera for a while now, but I never know how 'worth it' those things are. How much is toy and how much is decent camera?

Luckily this pondering coincided with my sister getting a new point-and-shoot camera to replace her 'ancient' one (featuring BOTH Digital screen AND Viewfinder, so as not to force you into technology's advancement too quickly!!). She said that if I could put up with the batteries only lasting for half-an-hour, Toby could use it.

I'd had it sitting on my counter in a pile of stuff for almost a month, and today as Toby crawled up on the couch and started riffling through my purse to find my camera for the first time in ages, I pulled out this old one of Shannon's.

I turned it on and the first thing that Toby did was press the shutter. Click, close up picture of the couch cushion. I directed him to hold the camera up and look at what he was taking a picture of and only press the shutter when he really wanted to take a picture, not just because you want to every 3 seconds.

"Mom I see a ladybug!!" Click.

(Can you find it?)

After 6 pictures of the ladybug and one of a squirrel on the bird feeder, he ventured off into the living room with a gigantic grin on his face.

Click, the rug.

Click, The ceiling.

Click, blurry close-up of a pillow.

"Hold on Toby, hold on. It's great you're enthusiastic, but really try to 'think' about what you want a picture of. Look at the screen and watch what you're doing.

He scanned the room.

"Like the STAIRS!" Click.

...Um....ok....

Next I lined up some of his cars, thinking that this would be a good 'focus' for picture taking.

Click, ON TO THE NEXT THING!

.........ok.

I sat on the couch, still not really awake, and let him wander around taking random pictures of house plants and flies.

Some stuff wasn't even too bad.

Rosemary.

 Fly swatter.

Parental unit.

Flowers.

30 pictures have gone by now, so I tried to direct his focus again.

"Toby, really try to pick just one thing, and then take a picture of it, instead of just pointing the camera at everything. Try and think "This looks amazing" before you go to take a picture."

He stopped and scanned the room again.

"This looks amazing" He whispered.

Click, top of the chair.

*sigh*

I know that teaching the art of photography to a three year old is maybe far-fetched, but I want him to have a sense of WHY we take photos. Before digital cameras I never would have just given a role of film to a toddler to 'waste'. I feel that while digital photography allows us a 'do-over' period, it still shouldn't be 'wasted' or the point of photography is lost.

But as I propped my head on my hand and watched as Toby searched the room for anything he hadn't photographed yet, I realized what I had just said to him.

Take pictures of 'amazing' things.

He's three. He hasn't had time the be jaded by REAL amazing things.

The fact that he can operate a camera is amazing enough to him. And when I look back through his photos, when was the last time I looked at my Rosemary like that?? When was the last time I thought a fly swatter was worth photographing?

Yes they're all out of focus and blurry, but is that really HIS fault or just the fact that the camera doesn't know how to focus on what he wants?

When you look past the technicalities, I do think he's taking pictures of things that fascinate him.

A tunnel of rosemary, the texture of the rug, a 'burst' of flower stems,

a circular tree root,

bottles in the window, 

plates in the window, 

the colour of books.

And at the end of it all, there are about 6 good pictures from the 52 that he took. Isn't that the same with all great photographers?

The point of the exercise was to learn to LOOK at what you're SEEING, not to take an award winning photo.

And I think Toby and I both learned a bit today.