Junior Master Gardener

I love that the kids are involved with 4-H. Specifically, the Junior Master Gardener program at Riverbanks Zoo and Garden. Sarah is always a week ahead on her assignments, but Alden and I struggle to keep up with his homework, and are generally up late getting it done - and still manage to stay about a week behind. Tonight (around 10pm), he and Zion worked together on an assignment that was right up his alley.

Edible bugs.

The idea was to show the symetrical nature of bugs. Did you know that bugs on earth, if gathered into a pile, would weigh MUCH more than all the people on earth?

Alden loves arranging his food into visual masterpieces anyway, so this was pure bliss. And, I managed to get Zion to eat peanut butter! Guess it helped that we forgot to eat dinner, so maybe she was just really hungry.

Before you think I'm a horrible mom to forget dinner, we ate lunch at 4pm. I wanted to try and cook Indian food from scratch, and it just took longer than I expected for the frozen sour cream to thaw.

Sarah said it wasn't bad, but it wasn't like the food we had in India, either. I think the rice was not dry enough and it could use just a bit more spice. The instructions were all in metric weights, like "soak 110 grams of black lentils and 30 grams of kidney beans, add 120 grams of tomato puree." So, I just guessed on most of it. Here they are, praying it will be edible.

Seedlings

One of my new hobbies, besides selling wigs on ebay to raise money for the adoption, is gardening. I started it when I realized the kids haven't had the experiences I did growing up with a mom with green thumbs, fingers and toes, who knows all the scientific names of every plant and has grown food organically since before I was born. I tried last year, and as you may recall, the garden was almost a complete failure. This year, I decided to start inside, with tomato seeds.

The only issue now is that I'm scared to take them outside. So, they are sortof past the "seedling" stage.


Ruth brought me some tulips from the Netherlands when she visited a few weeks ago. I though they seemed very odd when they began to poke out of the dirt, and now I realize why. I have this great crop of mushrooms in the tulip pot. Go figure. Need to find out if they are edible then cook um up!