Happy St. Patrick's Day! Here is an old Irish blessing for each of you:
May the blessing of light be on you
light without and light within.
May the blessed sunlight shine on you
and warm your heart
till it glows like a great peat fire.

 Tonight we had corned beef; carrots, turnips and apples glazed with apple cider; colcannon with cabbage, potatoes, spinach and scallions; and Irish soda bread. And Guinness of course.

One more blessing for good measure. This one was on the favors at our wedding:
Deep peace of the running wave to you.
Deep peace of the flowing air to you.
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.
Deep peace of the shining stars to you.
Deep peace of the Son of Peace to you.

Homeschool Sick Day

102 fever for two days, poor kid. This is one of the great perks of homeschooling. Snow keeps coming down outside, I don't have to drive anywhere, no worries about missing schoolwork and having hours of make-up homework when she goes back. She's been reading a lot and even did some math online. But mostly sleeping and listening to me read Emma to her.

March Seedling Progress

Here is some of the progress since I started the first seeds on February 14.

The artichokes are up! Some of them. They are pretty tricky to germinate. The cardoons keep coming and everything looks  strong and healthy.

Leeks are just poking up. 

Salad greens, kale and broccoli varieties are getting ready to go out in the garden under frost cover, and free up space under the lights for the next round: peppers and eggplants.

Spinach (Bordeaux and regular green) and cabbages in the sunny front windowsill.

I'm trying to sprout sweet potatoes for the ornamental vines. If it works, I can transplant the slips when they grow out the top of the potatoes, root them in water, and have enough for my containers and a few for the flowerbeds. Next to them is Red Russian kale.

Seed Starting 2014

If my artichokes and cardoons germinate and make it out to the garden, I will be so happy. So far only the cardoons have sprouted, after 8 days in the most perfect indoor conditions I could figure out after a lot of reading.

I have 15 wintersow jugs outside with perennials and frost-hardy annuals. I learned a hard lesson the last few years. Most things germinate and grow amazingly well in their little greenhouses, but rabbits mow down all the work -- seeding, waiting/watering for months and then transplanting from the jugs -- in one day. The places I most need flowers can't be fenced. This might be a year of container gardening for a lot of things.

Mixed orach from Baker Creek. It's so ornamental I was hoping to use it as an accent plant, but it's an edible green like spinach. The seedlings glow like Bright Lights Swiss Chard.

R switched her room with the guest room this year, so her old room is now the seedling room. I put some salad greens in seed pots, but the soil blocks are working well for everything else. Alyssum dries out and dies in the micro seed blocks, even though I water it three times a day. It's on heat mats with the petunias, which are sprouting faster than I've ever seen them with this setup. Alyssum needs another plan though. It's one of the few things that survives the conditions of our front yard flower beds, so it's worth trying again. The front windowsill has cool-germinating cole crops like broccoli and cauliflower, and kales and leeks, and they are all going to town. I learned that the secret to spinach is to germinate it in damp paper towels first.

We bought a pressurized garden sprayer this year, and it's even better than I expected for seedling watering. A perfect fine spray from a wand that you can target exactly where it needs to go, even to the far back rows of trays. I used to use a little spray bottle to mist seedlings, and my wrist would fall off after a few trays. You can't fit watering cans with big roses under the lights, and the other options would drown seedlings or leave corners dry. Now I have to make sure I'm not enthusiastically watering so much that my seeds damp off, because it's so fun and easy. It's a great investment, because once the garden is up and running, we can use the sprayer for compost tea, fish emulsion and foliar feeding, and organic bug spray. (Concoctions with Murphy's Oil soap and cayenne pepper.)

A lot of optimism in early March, when the seeding has been going along for a few weeks and things are popping up. The hard part is once the plants actually get outside in our harsh Colorado conditions. Drought and prolonged extreme heat and rabbits and bindweed, late spring and summer hail storms, it has been a rough few years lately for the garden. It's been a dry winter, so this doesn't promise to be the kind of spring that gets us off to a good start. I keep learning though, and trying again.

February Chickens

Everyone enjoyed some time outside today, before the next cold front and snow comes in tonight.

Obsessively herding his chickens is the only thing we've every found that tires Charlie out. This is all of them, except for Stellaluna, our Black Australorp, who has gone broody and was back in the coop sitting on some eggs. From the left is Egglantine, the Black Cochin; Fialka, the Ameraucana; Colette, the Buff Orpington; Fialka's sister Cricket, also an Ameraucana (they are the ones that lay blue/green eggs;) Marigold the Light Brahma; and Felicity the Cuckoo Maran.

It was a gorgeous, warm day. The ladies got in a lot of dust baths.

Don't look Charlie in the eye unless you have a clear conscience. He is very good at ferreting out disobedient thoughts in his hens.

Marigold is the cuddliest. She knows how to open the screen door with her beak, and tries to come in the house.She will follow you around chuckling at you until you pick her up.

I'm so proud of our hardy chicken girls, making it through stretches of below zero temperatures this winter without any problems. We've gotten kind of attached to them.

Sweet Peas

One year not too long ago, we had sweet peas in the front yard garden that looked like this.

They were started from seed indoors and planted out as seedlings. In the years following, I direct-seeded them, and hardly any even bloomed.

This year I want them to be spilling over the fence again, so I'm going back to the space and labor-intensive method and starting them from seed. Here they are after soaking and scarifying with a nail clipper, in their soil blocks before being covered with the top layer of soil.

I'm trying these for the first time, soil block makers for seedlings. The idea is that there are no plastic pots to buy /save/sterilize, more room for seedlings in each flat, and stronger seedlings that survive transplanting. I'm excited about using the micro blocks when it's time to plant basil and other plants that need heat to germinate. Heat mat real estate is so precious, and this should quadruple how many seedlings I can start on heat. The roots air prune, which means they reach the end of their blocks and stop growing, rather than circling around the pots. You can see how that would help with transplant shock. Eliot Coleman popularized this European method in the states. I'm diligent about saving and re-using the little black plastic seedling pots, but they eventually crack and give out, and this year mine all seem to be falling apart at the same time. So it's a great time to try something different.

I bought two sizes of block makers. The 3/4" mini blocks, and the larger 2" blocks that the minis can be potted up into once the seedlings are growing.

You fill and compact the block molds with soil, press down the plunger, and end up with perfect square blocks of soil ready for planting. There are different-sized dowel pin inserts that can be customized to make a hole just the right size for your seed. There is a special recipe for the soil block mix, because regular seedling mix won't hold together in the blocks. I think the micro might be too small for seeds as big as sweet peas, but I'm planting so many seeds that it's important to save space, so I'm giving it a try. I did one batch in the 2" blocks as a test, to see if those grow faster than the ones that start small and are potted up. Maybe one day I'll invest in root trainers, like Matt Matus in his Growing With Plants blog. His blog is so beautiful and well-written, and such an inspiration. Here's to a glorious fence-full of sweet peas again, if everything goes well.

Wide World

 

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Hamlet (1.5.167-8)

It is such a wide world, and a ten year old is just starting to see past the horizon of her own front yard. I love reading essays by people who are still curious and trying to figure it all out after eight or nine decades. Like this Roger Angell essay in the New Yorker,  This Old Man: Life in the Nineties. When a child gets in the car after school most days bored and discouraged, and spends the evening after lessons and extracurriculars hunched over worksheets, something is out of balance. I believe in drilling and memorizing, and I actually believe in worksheets. You need to know math facts and grammar and how to spell. The capitals of the fifty states. That can be tedious, and it takes practice and repetition. You don't stumble across it while admiring beetles and running free while other kids are trapped in school. The suspicion of sentimentality, of lack of rigor, is what kept me away from looking at alternatives to our parish school for so long.

But a schooling that leaves inspiration out entirely, that's lacking the spark of learning--I'm realizing that that is not only equally wrong, it might be worse. R had a science teacher in fourth grade who would engage the kids in class, and stay after school to answer questions and point kids to books they might like. Learning he would not be back to teach her in fifth was one of the triggers to pull her out to homeschool. R would get into the car at the end of the day excited about ideas she learned in his class and ask to go to the library to learn more. I started to wonder what it would be like if she was given time to do that in all her subjects. Even if she fell behind for awhile on testable skills, what if we just spread the world out in front of her, watched what she landed on and liked, and gave her all the time she wanted to explore it?

"Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in." 

- Leonardo da Vinci

Expecting the wide world to be interesting, grasping connections among subjects, the experience of catching light reflecting off a dry fact and deciding to follow that gleam, is what lasts for a lifetime. We're looking for a school that engages students in that way, because I don't think homeschooling is the best long term solution.

Whenever I panic that half the year is over and we have gone too deeply and not broadly enough, I think of this:

"For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth."
- Plutarch, "On Listening" in Moralia.

Laying kindling is a harder job than filling bottles with testable skills and facts. The future benefit to a child who is learning to think independently is hard to measure by having her fill in sets of circles halfway through fifth grade. In an era of education when the pendulum has swung so far off balance in favor of measurable results--where children are treated as generators of data points that are attached to financial rewards for schools, and increasingly, corporate interests--it's intimidating to swim against that tide.

There is an unsettling element of figuring it out as we go along that wakes me up with anxiety some nights. I keep praying to St. Catherine, and remind myself that R is changing this year. She makes connections across subjects. She rarely gets impatient and says "Just tell me what answer you want me to pick" as she did when we first started. She thinks critically about marketing when she sees ads, and identifies upselling on iPad apps. My friends have noticed that she's more poised with grownups. I notice a new confidence. She expects people to listen when she talks, even adults, and she listens to them as if they might have something interesting to say. She asks me to pause documentaries over and over so she can ask questions, unlike at the beginning of the year when she would just watch passively. Those are things we can't put back in the bottle now.