Gardening with Kids #4: Monarchs on the Move

Can you believe that monarch butterflies will travel all the way to Mexico this month? From their summer homes up north, they flutter their way south across the United States, pausing at roosts for a rest, and for energy sucking up nectar wherever they can find it.   On September 2nd, they were spotted in Ontario, Canada; by September 7th, people reported seeing them in northern Ohio.  How soon in Kentucky?  Pretty soon!  In addition to keeping a good lookout for monarchs in your neighborhood, you  click here to visit Journey North, a group which reports and maps sightings to track progress.  A new film, Flight of the Butterflies which is to be released this fall, also illustrates this amazing phenomenon… click here to see a brief introduction.

There is some concern that numbers of monarchs are low this year, with an explanation that the drought has affected the monarch’s habitat adversely.  Perhaps growing the sorts of plants monarchs like in your garden will help them along in years to come.  It might be interesting to visit a few of the rain gardens. drainage systems  and detention basins which are on a self-guided tour this Sunday, September 9th.  It is co-hosted by the  Lexington chapter of Wild Ones/Native Plants, Natural Landscapes and the Bluegrass Rain Garden Alliance, an affiliate of Bluegrass Pride.  Click Here for more information: Rain Garden Tour.

For other Inside/Out & About stories, click here.

Kentucky State Fair Slideshow: Gardening with Kids #3

2012 Kentucky State Fair …  for children of all ages …

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From a kid’s viewpoint, there is a lot to see and do at the Kentucky State Fair, which in 2012  runs from August 16 through 26 in Louisville.  If you don’t often encounter real farm animals in person, this is an opportunity to get in touch.  Different animals are there this week and next.  Then there are the giant pumpkins, veggie exhibits, 4H showcases, crafts, artwork,  … bring a stroller, because you’ll be doing a bit of walking.  Click KENTUCKY STATE FAIR  for details.

Gardening Kids #2: Soar with the Birds

And so the nightly feeding frenzy begins. Photo: Katie Sayre, Los Alamos, NM

Get kids engaged in nature by focusing their natural inquisitiveness on observing birds in their home environments.

Begin by putting feeders in your backyard, then expand awareness by asking questions, adding vocabulary,  and  showing how to identify each bird by finding their features using photos in a guide book.  Investigate food preferences for each type of bird in your yard, and plant greenery and flowers which they’ll uses as habitat.  You can get started with a click (here) to find articles at Birds & Blooms magazine about 50 Most Wanted Birds, as well as 10 Most Wanted Plants for backyard habitats.

A small guidebook, like the newly released Young Birder’s Guide by Bill Thompson III (Peterson Field Guides from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publishers, 364 pp, $15.95), has illustrations and photos to help you along.  Kids’ hands can easily flip through the paperback to find a page for each type of bird, with color photos, range maps, hints about what to watch and listen for and a kid-friendly WOW! blurb with a special message about each bird.  Click here to go to the Peterson Field Guide Web-site, and while you’re there, be sure to check out the Birds of North America App, which won the 2011 Best Outdoors App Ever award.  You can find many birding books at the library as well.

Work your way into exercising in the great outdoors by taking birding hikes, with your youngsters – and yourself-  decked out with a good pair of light-weight binoculars, perhaps a camera, and a birding vest with pockets to hold your guidebook, water,  hat, and a beginner’s life-list. (It’s never too early to begin keeping a life list!)  What a great gift package that would make for a holiday or birthday.

Keep an eye out for birding programs at parks, libraries, bookstores and birding groups.  Check out the Audubon Society of Kentucky, or your local National Audubon Society organization.   To get going with pizzazz, there will be a Wings of Wonder live bird show (click here) at Lexington’s downtown Living Arts and Sciences Center, 6-8 pm August 2.    Also, check out Jacobsen Park at sunrise in person; for Lexington Herald-Leader photographer Charles Bertrams latest slideshow featuring birds at the park, click here.

Then, take some of your own wild bird photos, right in your own backyard!

For more of Inside/Out & About, click here.

Gardening Kids #1: Gathering Cosmos Seeds

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There is a kind of butterfly cosmos flower that I just love  called ‘Little Ladybugs’.  These one-inch wide buttons of  sunshine yellow, orange and orangy-red blossoms are easy and quick to grow in containers or right in the ground, and not taller than two feet from root to blossom. They are perfectly sized for kids to pick and ponder.  Best of all, they are perfect for demonstrating a lesson in the cycle of planting a seed, watching it grow, and then saving the newly grown seeds to plant again.  A determined gardener might even fit in  three cycles during the summer months.

I got my original seeds from Renee’s Garden, which you can find on-line by clicking here: Renee’s Garden Web-site.  Renee Shepherd collects and test-cultivates seeds from around the world,  but the thing I like best about her operation is that she takes care of her customers by adding an extra flap of information on the seed packets, which are beautifully illustrated with original colored drawings, and also that she gives back to the gardening community with grants to charitable groups.  The seeds are fantastic.  At a time when many owners of on-line businesses are rather anonymously hidden behind the company logo, Renee is instead present, front and center, in addressing customers’ questions, providing information and timely articles, and creating community.  You can see that I’ve kept my original seed packet from two years ago, but after the first planting, I’ve just kept the seeds I collect from my garden flowers during the summer months to replant.  I store them in small envelopes in a cool, dry place.

I planted my seeds about 1/4 inch deep and 2 inches apart from each other, in an container with potting soil.  I chose a spot which got a lot of sun, but had some mid-day shade to mitigate the effect of the heat we’ve been having this summer. After about a week, the seeds sprouted and after about a month or six weeks, during which time I was careful to wather them every couple days, the plants w ere over a foot tall, with flowers ready to pop open.  The interesting thing is that you can see the full flower bloom, then the seeds forming when the petals fall off, and finally, a telstar-like formation of long black seeds that can be collected and saved.  Get them before they fall off on their own, and save them to plant next year… or even this year if there is enough time before frost.

It’s one think to tell a child about this process, but you develop a real understanding of how it works when it’s a hands- and eyes- on project in which they can participate.   Other plants easily grown from seed are zinnia and four-o[clocks.

At home in Momma’s field …

Momma was out in a field the other day, camera in hand, when a thought occurred about a point between being and nothingness, about what a person locked into today’s Kentucky lifestyle and 21st Century sensibilities recognizes in a pastoral scene where there is no object as a central focus.  Where’s the sign, building, person, animal, and what’s the point of that snapshot in time? Momma wonders if you’d say there is nothing in this photograph, in which case Momma rant-engine would rev up, and with apologies to Sartre for misuse of his title, and Andy Rooney for stealing some thunder, lock into high gear. Granted, this field is planted with grain, so apologies also to farmers who see a cultivated crop.

There is a real point here.  Stated straight away, it’s that “nothing”, in the form of open space,  is really something important.  It’s something we’ve devalued to the extent of not even recognizing it as valuable in itself, and in many cases even something we fear.   Once we cherished open space, glorified it in  patriotic odes … “Oh beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain …” and campfire choruses  like “Home, home on the range” were based in concrete, personal experiences of America’s undeveloped land; now, we’re afraid to send our kids into the woods, and we spend hours indoors exploring a digital, social media universe, and seem to need to fill empty fields with strip malls, hotels, billboards and highways.  That patch of grass downtown, under consideration for Center-something? I guess it’s out of the question just to let it remain a park.  After all, money is to be made, taxes levied, commerce upheld.

Not that those things are, in themselves, bad.  Momma loves to travel, shop, chat with Facebook friends and live in a nice house.  But, I’m afraid that we’ve lost our balance, and that the character of  our society has shifted, because we no longer see an open field as a place  in itself “to be”.   Yet, when I approached this field on the fringe of development, it felt restful, expanding with a bit of the unknown to explore, undefined by signage and unmarred by homes, swing sets and yes, even gardens.   We’re so used to having these signs of civilization and development around us, that we don’t realize something has been taken from us, tiny piece by tiny piece.  Sometimes, I play a little game here in Lexington, Kentucky.  I try to get to a spot where I can see nothing but plants, rocks, fields: no cars, buildings or people.  Once I find one, I wait until I can’t hear them, either.  Sure, I could travel to a wilderness area miles away for that experience, but I live most of my life in the city, and I’ve begun to think that we city dwellers need to re-think what our daily environment should include.  We need create and preserve places like parks, open spaces, and fields of nothingness which can calm and connect us to a direct, uninterpreted experience of our natural Earth.  Momma wants there to be such an oasis within easy walking distance of every city resident.  Momma wants you to look carefully at places you usually pass by without noticing, thinking that there is nothing to see.  It just might redefine wealth,  enabling us to recognize Paradise in what once seemed to be  nothingness.

Momma is Tick-Offed

Well, it’s tick season.  Next to running with scissors and poking your eye out with various sticks, ticks are a life-hazard about which Momma likes to share warnings.  One of Momma’s little angels is getting married soon, and her groom-to-be took to the woods last week for a Bachelor Camp-Out with some of his friends.  Sure enough, a tick found him attractive, too, and latched on.  Just sittin’ on a log is enough to get a tick’s  attention; walking through brush, even in the garden, can bring you into contact with these blood-suckers … and you won’t even know it.  Ticks inject their own anesthesia so you have no idea they’ve latched-on and dug-in to your tender parts.  The worst of it is that they carry diseases like Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and Lyme Disease that can back-wash into your body and cause you harm.  For a link to an informative discussion of tick ins and outs by University of Kentucky entomology professor Michael Potter, just CLICK HERE.

So, check for ticks frequently… look in the mirror when you’re back in the privacy of your own home after visiting the great outdoors, and if you’re going to be camping or hiking for a while, and take precautions during tick season and cover your skin by tucking pants into boots, or taping them tightly around your ankles.  Check your own children, and your dogs, too.  Mommas advice: Be safe … and get tick-offed often.

Thanks also to Nell Jean  for her suggestion.  Here’s Brad Paisley’s video, FYI …

Momma’s Full of Beans

My Momma kept a big vegetable garden, and put up preserves, canned goods in glass jars, and a freezer bags full of our harvest.    We lived on about 70 acres, which were mostly leased to a neighboring dairy farmer as pastures for cattle or fields for raising crops to feed those cows.  Our home was situated on a large hill overlooking a small village.  A narrow, winding road cut its way up through limestone outcroppings to reach us.  The view from the hilltop overlooked a lush, green valley, but closer to the house were marigold-edged plots where we planted corn, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, all kinds of herbs and a few experimental, irresistible oddities found in annual seed catalogs.  Daddy’s domain was fruit trees and berries.  Mine was beans, and that’s exactly what this story has to do with Mother’s Day.

My Momma told me that when I planted beans, they grew to be twice as good as when anyone else did it.  Maybe I had the spacing figured out perfectly, with a system of planting a pair of seeds together, then pulling out the weaker sprout after they’d grown a couple leaves. Every year, Momma  said “You have the magic touch,” and I believed her.  Every year, I was excited to take command of my rows: straight and orderly, weedless, and richly green.  I was caring for my family in the best way I could.  The hoe was my scepter; it wasn’t a chore, it was my duty to keep those beans in line.   Somewhere along the way, you’d think I’d have realized that all this was just Momma’s way of  getting me to learn how to garden, and to get me to do a little work.  Pretty much anybody can grow beans, right?  But the story continued. Did I really spot more perfect beans to pick than my sisters… beans at the peak of ripeness, still tender but a good size?  Was I truly the fastest snapper in the kitchen, breaking the beans into bite-sized pieces?  Probably not.  At least not all the time.  But defying that reasonable assessment, to this day, I remain quietly confident that when it comes to beans, I reign supreme.  As I have grown older, that success has fostered self-esteem and willingness to reach for other achievements, as well as put some delicious, healthy food on my plate.  And on Mother’s Day, I remember Momma’s voice saying ” … magic touch,” and go out to find a couple good packets of beans.

Vegetable Stew a la Momma

Mother’s Day is this weekend … and Momma would like to share some advice about living well…  Here’s Momma:

May is underway with a cold shiver-making rain here in Kentucky Bluegrass country. That’s why Momma (that’s me) is making vegetable soup.  I’m cooking soup because I know that its  steamy goodness warms a body up from the inside out.  The chunks of colorful tasty veggies in it brighten up the gloomy grey light under the cloud cover.  Every batch is different, because whatever is at hand gets thrown in.  Momma is pretty much “Waste Not, Want Not” when it comes to most things, so cleaning out the left-overs in the vegetable drawer comes with a chortle of self-congratulation.  This week cauliflower pieces, chopped spinach, green pepper, and carrots (left over from making the Easter Carrot Cake) were thrown into the over-sized pot.

The basic recipe: peel and chop a couple sweet onions and garlic wedges, and saute them for a few minutes in a small amount of vegetable oil in the bottom of a large stock pot; if you like mushrooms, throw a bunch of halved ones in, too.  Add two large cans of tomato or vegetable juice, a couple more cans of diced tomatoes (or use some peeled, diced tomatoes you’ve grown or have left-over), and whatever vegetables you have on hand.  Frozen corn and peas add extra color bits.  Momma buys them on sale and keeps them on hand; this week she also tossed in some baby lima beans, but just a few because it’s hard to get them by Papa, who complains about their texture.   Lately, I’ve been putting in herbs like tarragon, which adds a “fresh-mown lawn” flavor, as well as basil, celery salt, and black pepper; hold the salt until you taste the result to see if you need it after letting the mixture cook with a lid just tipped up a bit,  for about an hour on low heat, stirring about every 5 or 10 minutes.  If you want more starch, let some cubed potato pieces cook in the stew (I leave the peel on), or a cup of pasta… usually it takes about 20 or 30 minutes for them to soften in the boiling stew.  Before serving. you can add bite-sized pieces of cooked chicken, ham or tofu and heat through in individual bowls.  This recipe makes a pot-full, so it will be on hand for days in the ‘fridge, ready to micro-wave.  Such a flexible process, with so many vegetable and herb options… as well as meats and even grated cheese on top. Inexpensive, easy, and good.  Fun to do with little ones on the assembly line, especially if you make snuggling in and  reading “Stone Soup” part of the process.

Momma is concerned that it has been hard to get a garden planted with all the rain, since you’re not supposed to work the soil when it’s wet … something about it causing the texture to turn brick-like and cloddy.  But, little by little, it’s getting done, and there is hope for some home-grown veggies for the stew.  Cabbage, some squash, lettuce, peas are all in.  Waiting for warmer weather for the tomatoes.

This is Momma’s first blog post.  Look for future stew details, as well as other discussions about the way life goes on here at the homestead.  Better yet, subscribe and you’ll be among the first to know when Momma says … something new.