School's out for summer!

This was our first week of summer, which may explain why I haven't posted anything. On the one hand, I feel a bit bored and lost because Sedona and I used to snuggle and read books for the majority of every morning and now she's more interested in chasing around big sister. On the other hand, the house is amazingly more difficult to keep clean with TWO kids and a stressed out dog around all day. Just the dog hair is ridiculous. It's a cruel twist of fate that kids get out of school at the same time dogs are normally shedding anyway. Rather than snoozing away the morning, poor Angel (who's an 11 year old lab) finds it necessary to move from place to place, trying to find a spot that's both quiet and hidden from sticky fingers. Every time she gets up, I swear she leaves half her coat behind. I completely filled up the vacuum cleaner Friday and again today. Surely the cure to male pattern baldness lies in my dog's amazing ability to seemingly regrow her entire coat overnight. Then there are the crumbs. Because my children never stop moving, they also never stop eating. I'm seriously considering a "snacks may only be eaten outside" rule.

And, of course, there is my oldest's bitter disappointment that it is summer time at all. Every single day this week, we have had an emotional tantrum because she wanted to do workbooks, or do MORE workbooks, or go buy some workbooks. I have limited her to a few workbook pages and reading one primer story each day. Some days we have a fun activity to go along with the "seat work" or a little science experiment to do. Some of her favorites:

• She read "The Little Red Hen" and then we baked bread together while talking about where flour comes from
• She read "The Gingerbread Boy" and then we baked gingerbread men and women
• We made frost: mix 2 cups of ice and 1/2 cup salt in a stainless steel bowl and cover with saran wrap. Let sit 10 minutes and record observations. Frost will form on the outside of the bowl. Have fun explaining to a 4 year old that the ice did not move through the bowl, rather the water vapor in the air around us condensed and then froze on the bowl because it was so cold.
• We made gloop: mix 4oz white liquid glue and 1/2 cup water. In a separate container, mix 1/8 cup (2 tbsp) water and 1/2 tsp borax. Pour the borax mixture into the glue and stir, stir, stir. It will start to clump up. Continue stirring, until it's mostly clumped, then knead with your hands and let the kids play with it. It's a rubbery/bouncy consistency and doesn't stick to your hands at all. If you have older kids, you can explain the process to them--the borax polymerizes the glue.
• We made...ummmm....not sure what it's called: Mix 1/2 cup cornstarch and 1/2 cup baking soda. Mix in 1/4 cup water. This one is messy and we did it on the driveway---if you move fast, it will act like a solid, move slow and it will act like a liquid. Stab it with a spoon and you won't get anywhere, slowly move the spoon and it oozes right in. Pour it out on a cookie sheet and pick some up to roll into a ball. Set the ball on your palm, and it turns right back to liquid. Fun way to introduce the concepts of states of matter.

We are also doing a couple of reading programs. Our local library has a great summer reading program going on. The kids can do the reading themselves, or if they're too little, the parents can read to them. They keep a log and get several prizes throughout the summer. There are lots of fun activities going on in conjunction with this. And if you have a Half Price Books near you, they are also doing a summer reading program.

How does your garden grow?

Sierra finished pre-school this week. Her teacher does a little end of year party for everyone and she had a blast and is very excited to be starting Kindergarten in the fall.

We took her out for pancakes in the morning

Here she is getting her surprises from Ms. Lydia.

Then I made the mistake of letting her know I had a list of fun "summer school" activities to do (she's upset we aren't putting her in school for the summer this year). I've got three months of activities planned and I'm sure she'd get through it all in one week if I let her. I did break down and go ahead and do the volcano activity:




Her other big accomplishment this week is learning to ride her bike without training wheels!! We had been talking about getting her a new, bigger bike and by coincidence, one of our neighbors put a bigger girl's bike out on the curb for trash day! We had to replace one tire, but it was cheaper than a whole new bike! Starting on Tuesday, Josh took her up and down the street a few times every night. By Saturday, she had it down! She still can't start and stop completely on her own, but she's getting there! We're trying to figure out how to upload clips from our video camera to the computer, but need to find a different cable. In the meantime, I have a short clip from the regular camera (hard to tell, but he's not holding her at all, just ready to catch her just in case):


And lastly, some updated garden pictures:

Carrots, a few onions and nasturtiums:
Green Beans and Cucumbers climbing their archways:
A few different squashes:
Peppers and Okra just getting started:
Tomato plants:

Potatoes

To limit the spread of Early Blight to the tomatoes, I decided to pull all the potatoes this weekend. Also, I haven't seen evidence of blight on the potatoes, just the leaves, so I figured it was better to get them out now. Had we left them longer, we would have gotten more, but I think we did well anyway. We planted 12 pounds of seed potato and got 41.5 pounds back. Next year, I only want to plant Red La Sota potatoes--they gave us a MUCH higher yield (over 4 times what we planted, as opposed to barely 2 times what we planted on the White Kennebecs), and seem much more resistant to the blight.

For pest and disease control, I have been spraying everything with neem oil about once a month and spot treating where necessary once week. It has made a big big difference in pest control and I believe it's helping with the blight and powdery mildew too. I have gone out and cut diseased leaves off the tomato plants and removed them from the garden, but I haven't had to do as much of that as I usually do. We got a really really heavy rain yesterday, so it'll be interesting to see what sort of fungal problems crop up this week (the rain makes it all splash up from the soil).

Also an olla update: I give them two thumbs up and want to add more to the garden. The upside is that the plants in the olla bed are doing just as well, if not better than the other plants. The bed with the ollas has not been watered since the seedlings were transplanted and got established. I add water to them every day or every other day and find I end up using about 2 gallons of water over 6 ollas each time---this keeps twelve 3-4 foot tomato plants happy in 85-90 degree weather. It also greatly decreases the weeds in the bed. I'm only finding I need to pull weeds immediately around the ollas. The downsides are it's not fun to reach between the plants to fill them (I don't like the smell of tomato leaves) and occasionally I find spiders under the lids when I raise them. I don't have any good data or anything, but I'd say these save a significant amount of water, which also decreases the amount of rain water storage we need. I would like to have "real", larger ollas, but I'm not convinced the benefits of that outweigh the huge difference in cost.

Potato Soup

We had another homegrown meal today. I made bread bowls and potato soup..yum!!

On the bread bowls, I used this recipe from AllRecipes.com. The only change I made was I only split the dough into 4 portions, not 8, to get decent sized bowls and I didn't do the egg wash. On the soup, I started out with a recipe from The Best Recipe (awesome cook book, highly recommend it to anyone learning how to cook because they explain WHY they tell you to do certain things). I made a few changes though, so here's what I actually ended up doing:

2-3 tbsp olive oil
2 small onions, diced (from the garden)
3 pounds red la sota potatoes, peeled and diced (from the garden)
4 cups vegetable broth
2 cups whole milk
toppings

1. Saute onions until translucent. Add potatoes and very briefly saute
2. Add vegetable broth and bring to a boil
3. Reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, until potatoes are very tender
4. Ladel portions into food processor (I have a kitchen aid, a blender would also work) and process until smooth
5. Stir in milk and simmer until heated through
6. Fill bread bowls and top with shredded cheese, bacon and chives


Was listening to our local gardening show on the radio this afternoon. I didn't hear much of it, but the part I did catch let me know that we are primed for lots of early blight and powdery mildew this year. joy. Like it's not bad enough in a normal year. We have been spraying neem oil and have had great success in cutting down on pest problems. Hopefully this keeps the early blight and powdery mildew in check as well (since we've already seen a little of both). TennZen also did a great post today about making your own insecticidal soap. Very cheap to make your own and will work great on pests. You can use left over soap to make your own clothes detergent. I didn't go that route because it hasn't helped me with powdery mildew at all in the past and I didn't feel like I had time to "play around" before getting everything under control this year.