Granny's garden

For about half of my childhood, I lived 3 houses away from my grandmother. Many spring and summer days I spent wandering through her yard, watching her work and listening to her talk about the plants she was growing in both her flower and vegetable gardens.

I was 9 years old when we moved away from the little house 3 doors down from Granny's, but thanks to her, I clearly remember knowing the hydrangea was my favorite flower, the daffodils bloomed around Easter and the roses could be finicky to grow in her yard.

Even though I hadn't been alive for a decade yet, I knew how to respect the work of the gardeners (Don't cross the line into the vegetable garden! Don't step in the flower beds!) and reverence for the plants that grew in her yard whether they brought beauty or sustenance.

I snapped green beans until my thumbs hurt, smelled tomatoes canning in the kitchen, savored the fried squash and okra and ate hot boiled peanuts straight from the pressure cooker.

These were the sights, smells, sounds and tastes of my childhood summer.

Even though my grandmother doesn't grow as large of a vegetable garden as she used to, she still grows what she can and stores up food for the winter, and her flowers, they are as lovely as ever.

The company on the porch swing overlooking the flowers can't be beat either.

I treasure my own memories in and around Granny's garden, and I'm thrilled that my own children are able to experience a piece of her magic.

Where my memories were formed by climbing in the dogwood next to her flowers and running through sprinklers beside her veggies, my own children are swinging on her porch swing over the flowers and racing in the wagon by her veggies.

But I think the connection will be the same. This connection to the generations before and the way they provided food for the family.

This connection to the land we grew up on and learned from while it wove pieces of this dirt and these plants and trees into the fibers of our childhood.

They may not choose to have aster, gladiolas, marigolds, mums, coneflowers and four'o'clocks decorating the path to their own houses when they are grown.

But I hope these flowers color the beauty of what they remember Granny's house and gardens to be.

I can attest that it's a beautiful memory to hold of your childhood.

One that they might strive their entire adult life to replicate but only feel they've come home to when they visit Granny's garden again.

And the greatest gift is that she shares it all with us, both the literal gifts of her gardens and the knowledge, experience and expertise that brought her gardens to life.

blackberry jam & Saturday Lunch

Blackberry brambles line the old dirt track

Buckets in our hands and the sun on our backs,

One in the bucket, two in the child.

Picking these berries is gonna take a while.

And the fruits of the earth roll off in our hands;

Summer's easy pickin's in this red clay land.

The seasons all move to a master plan,

From blackberry blossoms to blackberry jam.

Every year when the blackberries that line our fence become ripe and I watch the kids meandering by the brambles staining their faces and hands while enjoying this sweet fruit, my mind fills with the song Blackberry Jam by Andy May.

Occasionally, if I'm lucky, the kids leave behind some blackberries, and I'm able to pick them.

I won't pretend to wholeheartedly enjoy the process of picking blackberries. My arms and hands inevitably end up scratched and poked to pieces, especially because there's always just one more berry beyond my reach, trapped within a mess of brambles and thorns.

But the jam that comes from those berries, especially the jam we consume in the winter with our homemade sourdough while we snuggle against the chill from outside, well, I'm able to live with a few scratches and pokes to have that.

And the Saturday Lunch, you won't find any blackberries here. We jammed them all this morning! But we did find some blueberries at the farmer's market to add to our eggs, potatoes, squash, onions and rosemary flatbread.

{this moment} - summer days

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo (or 2) - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. See Soulemama to play along.

in appreciation of boredom

I'll admit that 2 of my least favorite words to hear from the mouths of my littles are "I'm bored." As I watch so many children in our culture give in to constant media absorption to satiate their boredom, I'm disturbed by the inability of these children to entertain themselves without a screen. I want my kids to have experiences rather than constant screen time, to learn through manipulation and observation rather than someone else's experiences conveyed through a little box.

Over the last few years, I've been trying to turn my attitude toward boredom around and look at boredom as the well from which creativity can flow if I can give my children the right tools and mindset to work through their boredom. Sometimes pointing them to the outdoor to play is all they need, especially if the littlest one hears a sibling say, "remember when we turned these flowers blue!"

On other occasions, I keep various kits, interesting paper or otherwise acquired creative or educational ideas to help them occupy themselves and sometimes they even learn fascinating things in the process like this Sunprint kit that I stumbled across rather cheaply back in the winter.

After they gathered items from the yard and cut a few stencils from the kit, they read the directions on making the sun prints, how to open the paper in a dimly lit area, place their items, carry them into the sun, watch for the paper to turn white, then bring them in and quickly run them under water to "set" the exposure.

We may not have a darkroom setup to learn about photography, light, exposure and shading, but for a few dollars, we had a similar experience in our own home, and we worked through the boredom. By the time the sun printing was complete, two of the kids were drawing, another one reading, and boredom had lifted.

Usually though, a kit is not even needed as there are so many experiments and creative outlets that we can draw from if we brainstorm together to find a fun project. "Do you think milk freezes faster than water? What about vinegar? Soy sauce? Vegetable oil?"

What better way to find out than to gather as many kitchen liquids as we can find (although I retained veto power over the more expensive ones) and put an ounce of each liquid in an ice tray.

We each made a list of the liquids and hypothesized how long it would take for each liquid to freeze.

We checked the freezer every half hour until more than half of the liquids had frozen leaving the oil, syrup and soy sauce in various states of thickness or unchanged. We discussed what made these items different and whether they would freeze at all.

Would we know the answer to these questions if the kids never became bored? Maybe, probably. But likely through methods other than feeling, smelling, tasting these items and the characteristics they employed during the process.

Boredom, you are welcome anytime. We relish the creativity you inspire and savor the experiences you bring. Come again soon!

the art of learning

Certain elements of unschooling really appeal to me. (But then again so do certain elements of Waldorf, Montessori, Charlotte Mason, Unit-Based education, and Classical education.) I don't think I could ever fully unschool my kids (my brain lives in planning mode too much for that), but one thing I enjoy is trying different methods and seeing what happens. The beauty of unschooling is that you can truly try it out anytime, anywhere, anyway you choose.

With the summertime here and the kids home with me (or traveling with me as the case has been this summer), I've been looking for little ways, both happenstance and planned to incorporate learning into our every day. Oh, learning happens every day whether I incorporate it or not, like when the kids have to budget their spending money or when they discover random things about nature on a hike or in our own backyard. But sometimes incorporating can bring an everyday experience to another level.

Like this spider web that we discover between two of our tomato garden stakes which sparks a conversation about the condensation that forms on the grass and plants each evening as the air cools and the earth radiates the day's heat. That condensation allows the spider web to be more easily seen due to the reflection of light. We even examined in a few hours how the dew disappeared and the spider web was more difficult to see. We even talked a little bit about how the spider built such a large web while we slept and how similar it felt to Charlotte's Web.

In addition to random every day occurrences, I try to occasionally find an unschooling type outlet that my kids will enjoy that might help solidify or introduce a new idea for them. The summer seems to be a perfect time for this when we have so much time to choose activities at leisure.

While the older kids were helping me clean the house, Finn needed an activity to occupy his time and keep him from distracting the others. After we cleaned the kitchen area, he happily sat at the kitchen table with a little bit of food coloring and water in 3 bowls and 3 pipettes to help him mix colors in the 3 other bowls.

He had such a wonderful time of learning about color combination. He already knows about secondary colors and can tell you which primary colors you need to form the secondary colors, but with this little experiment, he was able to investigate what happens when you add a bit more blue to the green or purple to see the varying shades of blue-green and blue-purple.

Likewise, after the cleaning, the older kids helped me screw eye-hooks into 2 dowel rods and tie 2 lengths of rope between the eye-hooks, one rope shorter, and the other twice as long with a washer hanging in the middle.

The kids were thoroughly befuddled when after creating this confusing device, we filled a bucket with dish soap and water and walked out to the back yard. I explained to them that the washer kept weight on the longer roap to form a sort of oval and the cotton string would absorb the soap solution.

Well, Finn wasn't as adept with his smaller frame at achieving the goal.

But the older kids quickly figured out how to make this strange device work.

They also determined that if you walked against the slight breeze, the breeze would help move the bubble away from you instead of allowing it to splash right in your face. Smart kids, these are.

Paulie quickly mastered the art of large bubble making.

And before I knew it, he was making some 8-10 feet long.

His siblings just sat back and enjoyed the show.

And they all learned. Hmmm...much more fun than reading about wind direction, color combination, condensation and web construction in a book. As much as we love reading. ;)

Yarn Along and swimming

This week's knitting is a little more of the boring kind. I made a diagonal dishcloth while watching Paulie's swim meet yesterday. A small amount of cotton yarn was about all I could deal with while I was sitting for 4 hours in the late afternoon heat. My reading is a book that my hubby gave me for my birthday last week, The Devil in the White City. I had briefly heard of it when it came out a few years ago but quickly forgot about it. I'm not sure where he heard about it, maybe NPR, but it combines my favorite elements of artistry and history in a non-fiction crime story. The kind of book that Paul would never read, but I love.

Speaking of swimming, this is the last week of Paul's summer swim team and I've been remiss in posting any photos of him yet this year. Last night was exciting because while the butterfly is his least favorite event, he's one of the few boys on his team who can consistently complete the race without getting disqualified. The butterfly was his first race yesterday, and he won! We were so excited and proud of his hard work this season!