More Crab Apple Blossoms

Crab Apple Blossoms
Originally uploaded by Chez VH.

This tree is phenomenal this year!

Crab Apple Blossoms

photo by Terri

Crab Apple Blossoms
Originally uploaded by Chez VH.

Green

IMG_4056
Originally uploaded by Chez VH.

I love this time of year. The blossoms are just about ready to burst and the grass looks greener every time I look out the window.

A Bug's View

A Bug's View
Originally uploaded by Chez VH.

Spring is definitely here. 80 degrees today! I love this picture that Ria took in the back yard.

Insects

Here are both a close up photo of two bugs on our deck and a picture I drew of it.

Springtime in Wisconsin

Springtime in Wisconsin
Originally uploaded by Chez VH.

'Tis the strange nature of Wisconsin to allow kiddos to do a little ice skating (for this three year old, in boots) in warm weather clothes. Frank had SO much fun and was warmer than in pants that he couldn't keep dry with all the melting snow.

Back path

Back path - 6 days later
Originally uploaded by Chez VH.

Ah, spring is in the air and we just started planting seedlings yesterday, so I thought it was time to wake up the garden journal again. Just six days ago, this whole area was covered in several feet of snow. Now things are thawing out and the kids are enjoying barefeet on the deck courtesy of the sunny southern exposure.

The Return of the Fungi

The fungi is back again.

Garden Work Finally Starts to Pay Off

Here are two pictures of one of three zucchinis from our vegtable gardens (we ate the other two).

I think I saw a Cooper's Hawk

in our yard on Thursday. It was very large with brown coloring and stripes on it's tail. There was a lot of squawking going on all over our yard and I saw this thing in a tree, and it landed on the lawn for a few minutes. Frank and I were standing on the deck and looking on in awe (not being particularly quiet) and ended up scaring it away. Frank (age 2) is always impressed with anything that can be described as "BIG! " I looked at our Birds of Wisconsin book and my best guess is a juvenile Cooper's Hawk.

UPDATE: I think I figured it out (it was pretty far away and it wasn't on the grass for long). I think it's much more likely to have been a Ruffed Grouse. Silly me. :)

Mosses, Lichens, and Fungi

The other day my mom was reading this book to us. It is called Dead Log Alive.
It is about the Animals and other living things that live in dead trees. The three things we read about yesterday were lichens, mosses and fungi.

Lichens are sort of like plants that grow on trees. They have different colors and shapes. Terri (my 8 year old sister) noticed that they like sunlight. She noticed this because they grew on three sides of our trees (the parts that were sunny), but not on the shaded side. We found out from Dead Log Alive that lichens make their food from the sunlight. Here are some pictures of the lichen on onee of our trees. The part that doesn't have lichens on it is on the north side of the tree.

Mosses seem to be darker and fuzzier. I think they like shade more. The book says that, like mushrooms, they don't have roots. But Mosses contain chlorophyll and make their own food using sunlight. Here are some pictures of moss that were taken on the same tree as the pictures above.

















Mushrooms are a kind of fungi, but there are lots of kinds of mushrooms and here are some pictures of one kind that was in our yard. We found them in a hole that the dog dug near an old tree stump. Fungi like moist places.

Terri and Bernie Tour the Flowers

Most Beautiful Time of the Year

Despite the fact that we need a new mower, I think the yard is a fairyland right now with all of the blossoming trees and even the dandelions are still short enough to be charming. The little girls love nothing better right now than to wander about the yard picking wildflowers - and to take my digital camera out to take pictures of flowers. I'll be giving them their own post soon for that.

Bernie's Garden

We found the USB cord for the memory card, so now we're in business. St. Anthony must have known how much I needed to get some cleaning done in the basement.

We finished Bernie's Garden yesterday...

Favorite Big Gardens

Boerner Botanical Gardens, near Milwaukee Wisconsin

The Huntington, Pasadena, California (Botanical Gardens, Library and Art Museum - perfect for kids ala Charlotte Mason - too bad we don't live closer! We got to take Ria there once when she was almost 2 and the Map Guy was in utero. We had a delightful time inspired by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay's For the Children's Sake in which we introduced two pictures of children to Ria ahead of time - we had an old brochure around - and let her know that we were going to look for these pictures. Once we got there, we enjoyed all sorts of things - including letting her run around on the big lawns - until she asked to look for "her " pictures. What fun!)

Visits to gardens always go well with a big picnic lunch.

Boerner is inside a larger park that allows picnics.

The Huntington has a beautiful park - Lacy Park - nearby; perfect for picnics. Don't forget to stop at Trader Joe's for some great food!

Birds at our Birdfeeder

A narration by Terri (age 8)...

One day we went to the store and I saw a bird feeder and I wanted to ask Mommy if we could buy it. She said yes, so we bought it and filled it with bird food and hung it up outside the sunroom window.

In a few days, lots of birds started to come. We like to watch it when we're sitting down in the chairs - especially when we were sick. It's really fun to see. Once we saw two birds fighting on the bird feeder. We saw a squirrel clinging on with all four legs.

We found out what some of the birds were. There are blackbirds, chickadees, cardinals (a mommy and a daddy!), goldfinches, and sparrows. In our yard, we also see crows, mourning doves and robins; but we've never seen these at the birdfeeder.

Our birdfeeder has six openings with little sticks for the birds to sit on while they eat. I'm glad I saw it at the store.

Outdoor Inspiration

I've always loved the out-of-doors. I think this was instilled in me as a young child when we lived in Washington State and my family enjoyed lots of camping and outdoor activites. There are lots of pictures of me as a toddler in high chairs and playpens outside - even out in the snow.

My Alma Mater appealed to me partly because of its beautiful, spacious outdoors (surrounded by mountains which I miss greatly here in Wisconsin) and because the weather allowed you to spend so much time out-of-doors. John and I spent a lot of our early dating days watching stars from the middle of a field and going on long hikes in the state forest adjacent to TAC.

Now, here in Wisconsin, the winter weather and summer bugs create some limitations, but we enjoy our own acre of land (such richness for a suburb-raised kid from Silicon Valley) and I'm in love with windows. One reason why Ria thought we were like the family in Madeleine L'Engle's Meet the Austins was that I've been known, more than once, to drag "whoever is still awake" from their beds to go out and look at the stars on a beautiful night. Though we live a few hundred yards from a school and there are a few lights in the church parking lot across the street, our view can be quite beautiful right from our yard.

Well that was certainly a long intro to my story list I had planned. Here are two big-time favorites (these bring tears to my eyes just thinking about them); I'll leave some others for the kids to share later:

Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney. Such a wonderful picture book about making the world a more beautiful place. Involves flowers, libraries and traveling to exotic lands. What could be better? John has a few Taiwanese business associates that we've become rather good friends with. Some have come to our home to visit, meet the children, play in the snow, walk on a frozen lake with us, etc. When one of them invited John to visit his family when he was working in Taiwan, John wanted to bring a present to the man's young daughter. He wanted something that, while not overtly Catholic (the family is Buddhist), still shared in some depth some essence of who we are. He chose Miss Rumphius!

Miracles on Maple Hill by Virginia Sorenson. Terrific family story - the father of an modern urban family comes back from war shattered. His wife comes up with an idea that if he spends some time at her grandmother's old farm way out in the country, it might do him some good. I don't want to say more and ruin the story. Don't miss it!

I'm also hoping to post some time on some gardeners I've known who have inspired me.

By the way, this post is partly to console us because it's FINALLY opening day at one of our very favorite places in the world - Old World Wisconsin - and we're not yet well enough to go (it's a bit rainy anyway). We buy a season pass every year and often head down there for spring and fall afternoons (after the school groups have gone through and things are amazingly quiet). We only missed it one year when we were super busy getting our old house ready for sale. The spring is especially nice with all the baby animals.

Been Sick

I'm feeling very grateful that we had such a beautiful early spring so far. We got a lot of stuff started before we got hit big time with this nasty flu that's going around. We probably lost a few not-yet-planted seedlings because it was warm and dry last week, but now that the rain has set in for this coming week, we're actually in pretty good shape (good thing since Ria took sick tonight - she's the 5th kid down with this out of 6, with the Map Guy as our single hold out, but he's not feeling 100% either).

We did manage to finish up most of Bernie's garden this weekend. She's been a big part of the inspiration for this year's gardening. She's six and really into flowers. She poured over garden catalogs starting in January and it was so fun to get enthusiastic about her big plans. About 10 days ago we planted the front of her little flower garden with tulips, dahlias, and gladiolus (sp?) bulbs as well as some cute little flower seedlings - morning glory, canterbury bells, lavendar, moon flowers, and columbine. We put a few paving stones in the middle along with her little sign (at Target we picked up some metal garden frames that hold a tile with a letter on them - we splurged and got one for each child's garden). She also inherited a pretty hanging plant holder with a hummingbird motif. She absolutely loves it, but I've been a little concerned/amused that the set up looks a little bit like a cemetary plot.

Finally this Saturday, in the midst of running non-sick kids around to birthday parties, I found two butterfly bushes and we got them planted. I also picked up some pretty pink, purple and white petunias which we planted in an old hanging pot to put the finishing touch on her little corner of the yard. All we need now is a little more mulch and enough dry weather to plant some more gladiolus between the butterfly bushes. We figure that when the bushes get bigger (they're supposed to hit 8 to 10 feet tall AND wide within 5 years) that we'll move the gladiolus bulbs to a new location.

By the way, check out the other homeschool garden/outdoor blogs and sites in the sidebar. Some of these ladies are so amazing - all these beautiful books and ideas. Wow. One fun thing about blogging is seeing the difference in time between various flowers blooming based on location.

We're getting a lot more done this year than we've ever done before (partly because of the necessity - needed some color in the front yard big time, partly because we wanted to start each child on their own garden area and partly because, sigh, our "baby" of the family right now is over 2 years old - this has never happened before), but we're generally very seat-of-the-pants and kind of hit-and-miss in this sort of thing. It's a good thing we have all this Wisconsin former-farmland to work with. Tends to make our hit-and-miss attempts a little more successful - at least in the flower department, I think. I'm a little worried that the Map Guy's veggie garden will be shared primarily by rabbits and deer.

Photos should be forthcoming. Currently uploading pictures from the camera requires many more steps than it ought to. I do have a cable around somewhere that would allow me to download pictures directly onto my laptop. St. Anthony?

Cousins on the Ranch

These are two of the kids' cousins on their ranch in Oklahoma. Looks like we'll have to make a trip there someday. Click on the photo to read my brother's post on "Springtime at the Ranch." I think they're taking care of about 250 times our acreage!

Ria's Garden

Here's Ria's flower garden. We've all been working on this together to get it planted (Grandma's help and expertise and Grandad's special drill bit for garden bulbs were very much appreciated). We're not done yet - we put mulch on the parts that are planted. Sure is an improvement - particularly with the well-pipe so close to the front door.


By the way, we planted tulips (mostly white and a few mauve), lilies (some pink, some yellow), dahlias (similar color scheme) and purple irises so far. We still have a bunch of gladiolas and lilies of the valley and a few more dahlias to plant. Gotta love planting bulbs - it sure makes future years easier!