Slowly but surely, our garden is coming along.
Doesn’t look like much yet does it? Our beds are now completely prepped, with my herbs and greens coming along nicely. I put in my basil seedlings over the weekend and transplanted a few lettuce plants that I overwintered in another bed.
We’ve been eating spinach, kale and chives from the garden already. I’ve used a lot of the spinach and kale for green smoothies with frozen bananas and blueberries from last summer, as well as for dinner by sauteing them with a little bit of garlic. For the chives, I’ve been adding them to tuna salad, into wraps with beans and daiya cheese and of course on our baked potatoes. I can’t get enough chives this year. I have three plants, so I’m letting one flower so I can make up a batch of chive vinegar with the blossoms. Jason loves cottage cheese with chives, as well. This chive pesto sounds amazing. They also freeze wonderfully to use in the winter ~ just chop and throw in a freezer bag. And now that I’m thinking of all the uses for chives, I’m dreaming of farm fresh scrambled eggs with chives. Yum.
Our plan for this week is to get all the plants in if it ever stops raining. We’re not experiencing the flooding a lot of the country is, but the ground is much too wet for planting right now, and more storms are forecasted for today and possibly tomorrow. Eleanore is disappointed, as we’ve been meaning to plant all week, and we spent our one sunny day this week at the park.
We’re realizing now that we started our seeds too late this year and will need to supplement with plants from the farmer’s market, but we’re learning at least. Sigh. I do have feverfew and dill ready to go, although my seedlings are still small.
We’ve actually had more luck starting seeds in the house at our dining room table with good afternoon/evening sun than under our grow lights and heat mat, so I started some more seeds there ~ cosmos to go in my flower bed and some cucumbers and squash.
Pumpkins are doing well, as are my calendula seedlings. Tomatoes and peppers are small, so we’ll see if they amount to anything. We’ll get plants of each just in case.
We did direct sow some of our seeds ~ beets, carrots and more spinach and kale are in one bed with the garlic.
Jason built two more raised beds last weekend, and they’ll be filled with black dirt this weekend, and ready for squash and pumpkins. It was wonderful to spend almost all weekend outside again, especially after the cold rainy weather we’ve been having, and I put the plan together for each bed (finally).
Our biggest excitement this week was the arrival of our caterpillars! Perfect for the rainy days we’ve been having. Eleanore is so excited to watch them turn into butterflies, and I’ve been tying in our gardening with a few lessons on caterpillars and butterflies by talking about what kind of flowers butterflies enjoy, as well as learning about the butterfly’s life cycle. We planted a few of their favorites like cosmos and sunflowers and talked about a few that are already in the flowerbed and growing~ catnip, bee balm, black eyed susans and purple coneflower. We’ve painted butterflies
made these cute circle cup caterpillars and even had dorky hummus quesadilla caterpillars for lunch.
We did a lot of activities this week on caterpillars and butterflies because our weather was so icky. Eleanore enjoyed all the cutting and pasting though!
Other resources we’ve been using:
Where’s the bug scholastic printable
butterfly’s life printable from scholastic
Butterfly life cycle minibook
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Caterpillar and butterfly size sorting from 1plus1plus1equals1
These two pages of butterfly counters
United States butterfly cards and the flower book here at homeschoolshare
The Very Hungry Caterpillar sequencing cards
Butterfly coloring page (that we used to watercolor paint)
Butterfly cut and paste puzzle from scholastic
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