Gardening with the Girls

We have tomatoes in our garden!  I picked the first Early Girl tomato and some basil on July 9th to make this caprese salad. I try not to buy tomatoes from the grocery store throughout most of the year, which makes the first tomato of the summer SO much better! These are the tomatoes we've picked just this weekend (minus the four I used today for salsa and all the cherry tomatoes we've eaten straight from the garden).  So, I'll have to start freezing some this week.  I love seeing the shapes and colors of the different varieties.  Caya has enjoyed picking them with me and putting them in her bucket, while Kili picks and tries to eat green cherry tomatoes. This is a great idea I received from my CSA farmers on how to keep basil fresh.  Not only does it keep really well, but its a pretty center-piece, smells great, and reminds me daily to use it, plus Caya likes to pluck a leaf off every once in awhile to chew on. It is also zucchini season, I picked my firs

Backyard Gardening Caya picking and eating our first raspberries Well, strawberry season has been pretty crappy here in WI this year.  The unseasonably warm spring weather caused the berries to ripen before they had fully grown.  Good news, we already have red raspberries in our garden and the girls have been enjoying picking and eating them straight off the vine!  Note to self - berries are a great introduction to gardening for young kiddos. Our raised veggie garden Our raised vegetable garden is doing really well.  I had to put a fence around it since the rabbits were eating the beans, peppers, swiss chard and spinach.  The squirrels continue to jump over the fence, into the garden, but I don't really know how to stop that.  Ideally, I didn't want to fence in the garden because it makes it less accessible to the girls, but we were starting to lose a lot of our plants.  Hopefully, I can take the fence down later in the season once everything is more established.

“Eating is an agricultural act,” as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world—and what is to become of it.  To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world." Michael Pollan Thanks to some wonderful weather this week we have almost all of our garden planted.  Here's what we have in the raised bed so far: Transplants: Tomatos (6 different varieties!) Spinach Lettuce Swiss Chard Zucchini Summer Squash Cucumber Watermelon Peppers (4 different varie

Caya working on the raised garden We've had a busy past couple of weeks.  The nice weather has meant a lot of walks to the park, riding bikes on the sidewalk, and of course, working on the gardens. Completed raised vegetable bed.  We are going to wait a couple of weeks before planting to be safe from a frost. Our little Easter bunny! Caya was given a tomato growing kit for her birthday - bad move on my part trying to plant the seeds inside!  But we did notice them sprouting today (about a week after planting).  I told Caya that the tomato plants had sprouted, she ran into the kitchen all excited, looked in the pot, and said, "But where are the tomatoes?"  Well, I guess gardening is a good lesson on delayed gratification.  We did talk about how the seeds she planted had now sprouted.  My goal is to try and take pictures as they grow so she can go back and view the different stages of growth (that is, if they don't die while we are gone on vacation this n

"Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life." ~Wendel Berry, "The Pleasures of Eating" It was a rainy, chilly day today, so for an indoor activity I had Caya make a "Garden Plan" of all the veggies/fruits/flowers she would like to grow in our garden this year.  She looked through magazines, found pictures of things that she wanted to grow, and then cut (or had me help cut) and pasted them onto a poster paper.  

One of the things I love most about Madison, WI is the local enthusiasm for raising hens, even in residential neighborhoods.  Our neighbors have several chickens, which they kindly take Caya to feed about three days a week in the warm months.  Kilia even got involved in the action yesterday.  She wasn't scared, but seemed not too sure about the whole situation.  My dream, in our "real life" (post-residency) is to have a small chicken coop (trailer perhaps?) so that the girls can help with raising hens and collecting eggs.  I think it would be a great way to teach about local food production, composting (chickens are great at that!), the economics of food production, and ecology.  I still have to get Ian on board (he's not so keen on the whole chicken idea), but I'm sure these two adorable girls will be able to convince Daddy to get them a few chickens someday.

Yesterday we planted red leaf lettuce in one of the deck containers.  Caya was very excited and quickly delved into helping dig holes and filling them back in.  Kili, wanted to be involved, but mostly just stuck her hands in the dirt and tried to eat as much as possible.  After finishing with the lettuce Caya said we should look for worms, so look for worms we did!  We found many worms, larvae, and grubs in our backyard rain garden under the leaf litter.  Caya didn't want to touch the "wiggly worms", but she was really interested in digging through the leaves and dirt to find them.  Last night as I was tucking her into bed she had so many questions about the worms and bugs: "Why did they curl up when we touched them?", "What do they do?", "What do they eat?", "What eats them?"  This led to a really great, 3-yr old level, ecological conversation about food webs and healthy soil.  Day-1 was a gardening success!