Category

gardening

• 09.20.09
  Corn Shuckery
  Birds, Crafts, gardening (4)

  One of the less ambitious projects in Daniel Beard's summer chapter was to make a violin from a corn stalk.  In his romantic view any young man would have a pile of dried corn stalks just piled up behind his barn.  Well, we were lucky in that we had planted a "corn spiral" in our garden.  In other ways we were not so lucky.  The Indian Corn cross bred with all the sweet corn, and pretty much took over.  Since we never actually ate any of our corn it had to be put to some good use.  I researched a ...
  
  
• 02.09.09
  Butterflies Without a Net
  bugs, gardening, nature study (5)

  PART 1 - How to be a Man Around Butterflies. As a mom and a naturalist I know how I feel about butterflies, I love them.  I commonly stop what I am doing during the summer, and go out in the garden to observe butterflies.  On certain days in the summer there would be such throngs of Sister butterflies on our stretch of highway 35 that just driving the car would mean killing hundreds.  Needless to say, on those days I made other plans and abstained from driving.  I don't know exactly how Seth feels about butterflies.  I do know he ...
  
  
• 02.02.09
  Decorating the Garden
  decorative arts, gardening, xo (4)

  Every boy is a decorative artist. From drawing on each other with a Sharpie marker to arranging tacks just *so*, kids have a knack for freeing up their space with spontaneous decoration. This is because they want to, but mostly because they can. To them, art is an adventure in process, without agenda, so they never know what they'll find or learn with each new experience. For us well-meaning parents, it's easy to overlook the differences between "art" and "decoration." Art happens when we get lost, even while decorating. We didn't know how beautiful the peach would look, after a purple bath. Nor ...