Search Results for: blog know your seeds seed language

Creating Your Rain Garden

If you’ve decided to create a rain garden to channel moisture in your garden, here’s how to find a place for that unique garden. Plant a rain garden in a place where a drain might be located. If there is a wet area at the end of a parking lot, flatten the curb and allow water to flow onto marsh plants. Locate a rain garden underneath a drain pipe next to a house in an area where one might place a small drain. Work with the lay of the land to choose an area that is a problem area for … Continue reading →

Know Your Seeds: Seed Language

The language of seeds can be intimidating for a new gardener. What’s a hybrid? Hint: it’s not a plant that grows cars. What’s an open pollinated seed? Aren’t all seeds pollinated? Here’s a quick guide to some of the more common seed language you’ll see this winter. Hybrid seeds are created when two lines of seeds with desirable characteristics are crossed, and the resulting seeds are collected. Hybrid seeds are good if you’re looking for a specific characteristic. However, since these seeds breed with the characteristics for a single generation, if you try to save the seed from a hybrid, … Continue reading →

Ten Outdoor Activities You Can Do With Your Baby This Fall

Do you need to get out of the house? Need more ways to entertain you and your baby this fall? Make a cool or rainy fall walk into a fun walk – it doesn’t take much! 1. Go outside in the rain or just after a rain. Where I live, it rains a lot in the fall and winter. In fact, the year that my daughter was born, we broke the winter rain record and had rain for more than 30 days in a row. Needless to say, we went outside in the rain. Invest in a good pair of … Continue reading →

Family Home Evening: Building Your Testimony

It is important to talk to your children about gaining and strengthening their testimonies. This family home evening lesson is going to focus on testimonies and how to build them up. It will also stress the importance of continuing to nourish your testimony once you have received it. You can prepare for the lesson by reading Alma 32:28-43. You may want to choose just one verse from the passage to open the lesson or you can begin by asking your children what a testimony is. You should make it clear that a testimony is a declaration of faith. Next you … Continue reading →

Beautiful Gardens

Am I the only one itching to plant a garden? As soon as we have a warm day or two I’m day dreaming about my yard. I have a confession, I’ve already planted peas and will get the beets and lettuce in the ground this weekend. Planting a vegetable garden does wonders for your budget and your eating habits. Yes, growing tomatoes takes longer than going to the store but just imagine how wonderful that salsa will taste when you can say it all came out of your garden. Also, when you grow it you know what chemicals it’s been … Continue reading →

Why Plant a Rain Garden?

Plants have been filtering water for a long time. Before people invented drains to move water, plants caught that water and returned it slowly to the soil. Restore some of the natural balance of plants and water flow with a rain garden. What is a rain garden? A rain garden is a water or wetland garden that features carefully-chosen plants that have one common feature: they help water soak into the ground. By allowing stormwater runoff to soak into the ground, a rain garden reduces the need for storm drains. Storm drains move water very quickly from the ground into … Continue reading →

Wall to Wall: Growing Food Indoors

I recently started following someone on Twitter who gardens in her bathroom. Vertically. All jokes about the availability of fertilizer aside, this is a good place to garden. After all, it’s warm and it’s damp, probably once a day at least. If you replace some of your bathroom lighting with a grow light, you’d have the perfect tropical conditions – that is, until you open your window! Now, I don’t garden in my bathroom, although I’m now feeling somewhat inspired to do so. Between the towel racks and the toothbrushes, there just doesn’t seem to be that much space. However, … Continue reading →

Tools to Teach Kindergarten

Homeschooling your Kindergartener will come with challenges, frustration, joy, and so much fun. Kindergarteners are naturally curious so this can make learning both difficult and easy. Difficult because the child often gets distracted and wants to veer off to the left of your straight path. Easy in the sense that you get a student ready, willing, and able to learn anything and everything she sees. It’s up to you to find the proper tools to guide your little student down the right path. I hear “What curriculum should I use for my Kindergartener?” all the time. It is reasonable that … Continue reading →

Secondhand Lions (2003)

“Secondhand Lions” is a delightful movie starring Haley Joel Osment as a young boy being raised by an irresponsible mother (Kyra Sedgwick). When his mother comes up with yet another get-ahead idea, this time a court reporting school in Ft. Worth, Walter is taken to live with two great-uncles he’s never met. Later, when he discovers that his mother never did enroll in that school, Walter feels abandoned and betrayed, but his uncles step in to take up the slack, in their own unique ways. Garth and Hub are unusual men, to say the least. They’re both getting on in … Continue reading →

My Kindergarten – Rosemary Wells

Rosemary Wells has made quite a name for herself with children’s books that feature animals as the main characters. Perhaps you’d know her best from “Max and Ruby.” While this brother/sister combo are probably her most famous characters, she has created several, and “My Kindergarten” features many of them. Much thicker and more involved than her other books, Rosemary put together this book with a great deal of thought into the curriculum taught at kindergarten so she could complement that curriculum with the things she chose to include in the book. We begin in September with the first day of … Continue reading →