Fiona spends most of the night in her own bed these days, but about half the time she shows up at first light either in my bed or in the little nest on the floor beside my bed. This morning
GRUBS jackpot
When we arrived at the GRUBS* garden today, this is what we saw tucked off in a nearby corner of the health centre property. The maintenance guys have been busy building something, and taking apart other things, and they used
Out of the dirt
The really nice thing about the Gatto quote I used in my recent post is that it acts as a segué into any of a number of gardening-themed educational metaphors. This is part of the GRUBS garden. Along this fence
Cherry picking
Noah is showing some interest in the camera. He notices colours especially, and several times in the past week has gone to grab the camera when he’s noticed some interesting colours outside. He liked the red and green together in
Solstice visitor
Drat, I thought we were done with these guys for the year. Usually once May rolls by, the bears have moved on to higher areas where the risk of human contact is lower. And I had hoped that with most
Two tomatoes, chapter 2
Here are the two tomato plants I wrote about ten days ago. Scissors are for scale. Sophie’s plant has opened up a still bigger lead. In fact, mine doesn’t seem to have done anything at all since . Isn’t compost
Wormy again
All the chicken poop I added to the compost a month and a half ago is doing amazing things. It’s about halfway finished composting already and we’ll have another 10 cu. ft. of compost by the middle of the summer
Two tomato plants
The deer and the bears and the crows and ravens eat out of our compost pile. You’d think we’d try to do something about that. We did. For years we tried various containers and covers and bins and the like.
Of quack grass and garden magic
Here is what we’ve built in the garden. In the bottom corner of the nearest raised bed are Edward, Joe and Mimi, who are Noah’s tomato plants. Fiona’s bed, with the green sign, was constructed first, and is showing the
New beginnings in the garden
Since Fiona was born, the vegetable garden has really gone to weed. Really, really. I’ve half-heartedly thrown some seeds in a couple of springs, but most of my limited gardening time and energy has gone into the GRUBS garden. The
Back to GRUB-bing
The Science Club kids (a.k.a. the homeschooled core of the GRUBS club) got busy planting for spring today. We planted five flats of seedlings with great gusto. Oddly enough Fiona was most interested in planting sweet peppers; she refuses to
Harvest Festival
The GRUBS held their 2nd annual Harvest Festival last weekend. It was a chance to celebrate another successful growing year, to have a feast, to have fun together and to thank the community at large for its support. We churned
First GRUBS salad
Here is Fiona enjoying her first garden salad of the year. It was just a perfect “Fiona-sized salad”, made up of 6 or 8 shoots of fresh chive, a few snippets of fresh parsley, the first harvest of garden cress,
A GRUBS Day
Today was a typical GRUBS meeting and I thought I’d write a little about how the sessions operate, since we’ve kind of evolved into an approach that works. Donna (the other main organizer) and I both had things to bring