Port Potager

In yesterday's Boston Globe (online, at least) there was a piece about bringing back Home Ec courses in schools. Apparently, "kids these days" don't know how to do anything important any more, and all the practical skills have been pushed out of schools because they aren't tested.  Part of me thinks, "Yes! Home Ec and Shop are totally important life skills." Also, I want to be the curriculum writer and teacher of that subject because it would be a blast and I would make it so awesome. The other part of me thinks, "No! How much more can you possibly expect a school to accomplish? Can't parents teach their kids anything any more without outsourcing it to already-overburdened schools?" And a third part of me thinks, "Who cares? My kids are well on their way to self-sufficiency. They clean their rooms, do their own laundry, care for the animals, and help with daily kitchen clean up."  Best of all, they are also lear...

This is another fairly easy quadrant to plan, because (like the patio quadrant ) it has a big section of perennial plantings that don't change from year to year. In this section, the left side is our asparagus bed, and across the top we have a line of grapes and our perennial herbs (more detail about that can be found on last year's master plan ):  Many of our sun-loving, warm weather veggies went into this section (for good reason — it's never in the shade!). Along the right hand side are tomatillos (just three this year instead of four) and cantaloupe (just one hill instead of three), with a path border of nasturtiums at the entryway. This is a section that is smaller than last year, as we found that we couldn't keep up with all the tomatillos, and that we just don't love cantaloupe enough to plant more than one hill of them. Sure, they're delicious right off the vine, but we are hoping that our berries come in this summer as well, so we cut back on ...

To their delight, the kids' seeds have sprouted and are growing strong after all this rain: Our original plan when we were working on this year's planting maps was to give the kids each a section of their own to grow whatever they liked. They politely declined; we filled up the garden with our own choices. Well, then we were at the seed display at one of the local nurseries, and Tiegan decided she wanted to choose a seed packet. Turns out she suddenly remembered that we had promised her a plot of her own back in the winter. After much agonizing, she chose strawberry popping corn. This is a variety of corn that is supposed to have small ear of red corn, which is meant to be popped. The ears should be small enough to put into a brown paper bag and pop in the microwave directly from the cob. That all sounds pretty exciting; so far they are growing quite well: Well, once Tiegan's seeds came up, Jonas wanted to plant something too. He chose a pole bean, and they...

This is my third day of work and our third day of rain, so I haven't spent much time outside in the garden this week. We've all been stuck inside, but apparently that big old garden is never far from our thoughts. To wit, check out Tiegan's first homework assignment of fourth grade: To get to know each other, the kids need to fill a bag with items that represent their personalities (based on the bulleted prompts at the bottom of the page). What's that in the ziploc baggie? A radish she went out and picked from the garden to take in to school. She chose it because it's a "non-leaf vegetable." Below is a close-up of the prompts. See if you can guess which one the radish is in response to. It could be almost any of them, but if you guessed "something special about your family," you win the prize. Your prize can be the radish. Mine is a great kid.