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.

Little Fox

R drew this fox during art time on Friday. I love the reddish coloring in the face. We love foxes, as long as they stay outside our fences and away from our chickens.

Deep Freeze

It finally got up to 0 degrees at 2:00 today, after a low of -19 last night. The sun is out but everything feels suspended. 

The cold frame in the garden is crusted over with ice. In a few months it will be closed, with green seedlings sprouting under the glass.

The chickens got an extra treat of hot oatmeal with their apples this morning. It's messy but they love it. I checked for frostbitten combs and feet, but they all seem to be fine.

Inside we are listening to the furnace crank on over and over, while the wind blows smoky snow past the windows. Our house is so bright and white inside when the sun reflects off the snow that our eyes get tired after awhile. We are working away at Greek history. R surprised me by showing me this picture from her history textbook (The Human Odyssey), and asking if this is the same painting we saw at the Art Museum last week. She's right! It's "Le Cheval de Troie (The Trojan horse)" (1874) by Henri-Paul Le Motte. I love when she puts ideas together across subjects like that.

We looked at some other artists' conceptions of the Trojan horse, some that looked like a realistic horse and some, like this amazing painted still from the 2004 movie Troy,  that looked like they had been nailed together with ships' timbers. Or the "planks of fir" from Virgil's Aeneid. 

After many years have slipped by, the leaders of the Greeks,
opposed by the Fates, and damaged by the war,
build a horse of mountainous size, through Pallas’s divine art,
and weave planks of fir over its ribs:
they pretend it’s a votive offering: this rumour spreads.
They secretly hide a picked body of men, chosen by lot,
there, in the dark body, filling the belly and the huge
cavernous insides with armed warriors.

- (Virgil's Aeneid, Book II)

January Is Rounded With a Snow

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
- The Tempest Act 4, Scene 1, 148-58

January closed with a big blustery snowstorm.

R's tree swing. 

 

Silver maple in a sugar snow. 

I promise the chickens are o.k. Charlie. We let them tough it out so they'll be hardy enough for cold weather, but when it gets close to zero we put a heat lamp in their coop. Their waterer has a heated base also, so it never freezes. Charlie only trusts himself with their well-being.

Good dog. 

Marshmallow roasting with Daddy after a long, cold afternoon sledding with the neighbors. Charlie used to hate the fire as a puppy. He would bark at it and run upstairs to glower from a safe distance. Gradually he got used to it and now he can relax and warm his fur next to it. Except if someone makes a blowing sound, to stoke the fire or put out a flaming marshmallow--that drives him crazy for some reason. I love all the border collie hyper-aware eccentricities. And that they are so happy to come inside for cuddles on laps when their feral outdoor time is done.

Passport to Paris at the Denver Art Museum

D had the day off yesterday, and we took off to see the Denver Art Museum's Passport to Paris Exhibit. R spent a long time looking at this Cezanne painting, House in the Country. She liked being able to get up close and examine the short rough parallel brushstrokes. We talked about how the branches gave it a kind of wild energy, with the house more serene and recessed in the background.
We decided to make a special-occasion day of it, and start with a French meal at Le Central. I had moules frites au pistou. R didn't like the mussels, but she loved dipping her bread in the hot garlicky wine broth. Le Central has been around for 33 years, and the menu is authentic and affordable French country cooking.

We had our wedding rehearsal dinner here, on the beautiful back patio with lights twinkling and friends and family from across the country together in one room. I love this picture 11+ years later. The chef has brochures that talk about his background, hometown of Toulon and the style of cooking there. I made myself hold back and not push the "this is educational!" enthusiasm on R, and she ended up reading it and asking about Provence and Toulon and wanting to make some of the recipes. 

The "Passport to Paris"exhibit featured Impressionist paintings on loan from other collections, and it was pretty spectacular. The first rooms were earlier works that placed them in the context of Louis XIV and life at Versailles, and revealed how changes in art and society mirrored each other. R liked the antiques, particularly the 18th century sedan chair and the description of aristocrats carried in them because the streets flowed with mud and raw sewage. She asked for a print of the painting above, Louis Anquetin's 'Avenue de Clichy,' so she could take it home and hang it next to her bed and pretend at night that she's walking down a nighttime street in Paris.

R said her favorite piece of the day was this endearing little menu drawn by Paul Gaugin in 1900, in watercolor and conté crayon, illustrating the La Fontaine fable of the fox and the crow. It was in the Drawing Room collection of French drawings, framed next to another Gauguin menu featuring a Breton and Tahitian woman talking having a conversation.

Before Christmas we had watched the lively and entertaining BBC series, The Impressionists: Painting and Revolution, with art writer Waldemar Januszczak. It was a revelation as he blew the dust off some of the clichés that trap impressionists on candy boxes and umbrellas and silk scarves. One of the saddest stories in the documentary was Gaugin's love for his children, and heartbreak when his wife left him and took them away because he failed to live up to her family's idea of a respectable middle class provider. That made this little menu all the more touching, since it was painted after Gaugin had traveled alone to Tahiti. It gives a glimpse into his relaxed humor with friends. From the museum's website, "The menu planned for the evening’s dinner appears in a whimsical combination of French and Tahitian. It began with aperitifs and “foutimaises assorties,” a made-up word derived from the word “foutaises,” meaning something silly."

We ended our day with a visit to the Art Studio on the first floor, that was set up with various stations to practice methods of drawing. Still life tableaux, poseable anatomical models of people and animals, easels, paper and every kind of medium from crayons to charcoal to sumi ink. Videos of working artists were playing, and you could pick up a book about drawing and sit down at one of the tables to study it. There was a station for scribble drawing, and one for making your own drawing machine.

This wall-size drawing machine used pens that could be tied at different lengths to trace arcs and circles. The Paul Klee quote says, "A drawing is simply a line going for a walk."

R's finished charcoal still life.

She pinned it to the art wall when we left.

We love the art museum, and this is one of the best days we've ever had there. Being able to visit in the middle of the day on a Tuesday is one of the best things about our homeschooling schedule.