homesteading, in the kitchen, Seasons

Apple Processing Day

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Our backyard apple tree produced 14 pounds of usable fruit this year. It took two of us, with the ladder and some careful contortioning, to harvest nearly all of it. I don’t do anything to protect the fruit from the rest of Nature, no spraying and no little fruit socks. (I bought a package of fruit socks one year, and the process of getting one sock on one apple while I was still standing on the ground was challenging enough that I’ve never been inspired to try to do it from the top of a ladder.) The resulting fruit is …

Art, Caitlyn, homeschooling, Introspection

Kids Art Week, Day 1

 

Caitlyn and I are following along with Carla Sonheim‘s 2016 installment of Kids Art Week. Five days of free how-to art project posts with each project inspired by the work of a famous artist. Caitlyn’s a good artist already, having produced some nicely drawn dragons last December. I like the idea of making more art myself, but I find myself frequently stymied by the blank page. One would think I’d have some clue how to handle that since I write a fair bit. Maybe it’s that I can call the writing “journaling” and string together free-association thoughts until there’s something …

Caitlyn, homeschooling, in the kitchen

Taffy Pulling, Because Science!

 

It started with an idle comment. It ended up a many-houred end-of-school-year sugar-coated event. This goopy stuff is homemade salt water taffy. An exploration of sugar, chemistry, and the relative strength of various arms. I gave the kids (Caitlyn and some homeschool friends) a short lecture about atomic structure, molecular bonds, solutions (and why it’s not a reaction), and what it means to be supersaturated. I’m never really sure how these little talks land with the kids; Caitlyn always says very positive things but the others are often so quiet I’m not at all certain anything sticks. I’ve decided to …

Introspection

Thinking about Rocks and Time (Trail of Two Forests)

There’s something surreal about rocks that clearly show they were once liquid. Reading about lava flows is one thing. Sure, it says the rock was liquid, and I don’t doubt it. But getting up close to a rock, with all of it’s solid hardness, and finding a curved and rippled surface not unlike some cake batters kind of puts it in perspective. Once upon a time, this solid surface moved like water. You can see the ripples in this photo, at about the 2 o’clock position on the tree mold.  Roughly 2000 years ago, Mt. St. Helens erupted lava which …

community, homesteading

A Morning Visitor

 

Wasabi was on a bit more of a tear than usual this morning, which made total sense once we realized we had a visitor: We spent the rest of breakfast watching her clamber around in the cherry tree, rather systematically eating all the cherries. Good thing I don’t expect harvestable fruit from that tree! She (I’m assuming it’s female based on this site which says that while commonly nocturnal, raccoons can be active during the day, especially if there are kits back in the den.  Raccoon kits typically arrive in April and May, and Mama tends to stay with them …

Caitlyn, education, field trips, homeschooling, quilts, Seasons, sewing

May’s report

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It’s official: individual detailed reports of what I’ve been doing are completely beyond my capacity at the moment. So, here’s the overview of what we did in May: We joined some friends at LUCO‘s Chamber Music Cabaret. There was a piccolo trio, and Caitlyn got pulled from the audience to read raffle ticket winning numbers. Caitlyn and I joined some of our homeschool friends for another field trip to a farm. This time we drove across the mountains to Little Wing Farm where we spent the day touring the orchards and generally traipsing around. Caitlyn has been having a digression …