Hardening Off the Lettuce, and Our Version of Hotcaps

Yesterday Amie and I made hotcaps (or some version thereof) for our lettuces, some of which are bursting out of their already large containers downstairs. I had hoped to transplant them into the cold frame before today, but the weather has been in the extremes. Three days ago, for instance, the max in the (unvented) …

Drawing: Clothes and Fingers

The other day Amie made two drawings of her friend, Abby, for her birthday. Here Abby has fingers. Five fingers, Amie counted them out, one by one, as she was drawing them. As for the other hand, she explained the fingers are hidden in a fist. Abby also wears sleeves and a long skirt. And …

You Grew Up, Rabbit, That’s Why

Amie and Pooh Bear It was our co-houser’s birthday so Amie and I baked some cookies and sang Happy Birthday while he blew out a candle. Then we sat down to eat, and we each had a glass of milk. Amie repeated that she had made the cookies for him and Rabbit (Amie picked the …

Coperthwaite on Children at Home

In A Handmade Life (read a general review here), Bill Coperthwaite promotes a different view of education. If education is more of an apprenticeship than a discipleship, if it allows the innate enthusiasm of children for the unknown to run its natural course, and if it acknowledges the value of nature, then children and, by …

A Page from my Garden Book, and Pruning the House

I’ve pruned our house, that is, pulled all the suckers! That is, I unplugged all the appliances that suck electricity even though they’re not in use. Like battery chargers of all kinds (they don’t need to be charging anything to be drawing electricity anything that has little lights or clocks, like the microwave anything on …

Ode to Last Weekend

Last Saturday we had a big dinner with a whole bunch of friends and  one of them even stayed over! Oh, I love having people stay over, especially the kind of friend you sit and chat with, after the dishes are done, until  midnight… Sunday warm (“heated up,” even, relatively) as we drove “into town” …

Cold Frame (almost) Installed

Finally an outdoor garden photo! The construction of the cold frame is done and we placed it in front of our house to the south and at the top of a slope. That place gets optimal sunlight during the winter, but not much during the summer, as it will be shaded for most of the …

Bottom Heat for Germination

The growing rack is filling up. The bottom shelf is now exclusively a “hot box”, where the most heat-loving seeds go to germinate. Yesterday I added three kinds of basil (Tulsi or sacred basil, Genovese and sweet Italian) and greek oregano to the already resident eggplant, peppers, parsley and rosemary. The second shelf is the …