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Five tips to make gardening with young kids easier

Gardening with munchkins is tough, but hey, raising kiddos is not an easy thing either!

Sometimes watching those little chubby fingers pluck a baby tomato plant from its home, or turning around to see them all sitting nicely ON TOP OFF the baby lettuce peeking through the dirt is more than I can handle. But I have to remember that raising kids is more important than raising plants. And it is so worth it when you catch a glimpse of your little ones munching on fresh strawberries or telling the baby plants they love them and they will take care of them…. awwww so cute!

But until then, here are a few things that I have learned that make it just a little bit easier on you and your precious little plants.

1. Start your kids in the garden young. I mean really young guys. Like as soon as they can sit up plop them in the dirt and let them taste it, feel it, love it. Then as they get older, let them follow you around and talk! talk! talk! to them about the special plants. They learn really fast how important the plants are and then they will want to take care of them just as much as you do.

2. Focus on 1 or 2 rules instead of overwhelming them with “no!”. We focus on pathways. Pathways, pathways, pathways. I probably say it 50 times a day and I SHOW them where the pathways are every time I plant something. We walk back and forth on the pathways a million times and I remind them to always stay on the pathways. Pathways, pathways, pathways. …. Did I mention pathways??? Little Man (6) and Sweetie Pie (4) have mastered this and almost never step off the pathways unless they fall accidentally. Boss (2) is a work in progress but I anticipate he will have it down by the end of the year. If they can get the pathways thing down, then your freshly planted seeds and tiny baby plants will be safer from trampling, sitting on, and all other types of squishing or destroying.

3. Give your kids their own area to dig. Every kid I have ever met loves a freshly dug patch of crumbly dirt, which would be why your freshly churned soil looks so scrumptious and irresistible to them. It looks scrumptious and irresistible to me too. So let them dig! Just not where your seeds are planted in neat little rows. Show them which area is theirs and help them loosen the soil every once in awhile. Nobody wants to play in hard crusty dry dirt!

4. Give them their OWN tools and gloves, and find something that they can help with. When you first start letting them help, you will sit down exhausted at the end of the day and wonder “What the heck did I accomplish today? …. The kids and I spent all day TRYING to plant the garden and we got about, um, 1/10 of it done …… is that ALL I did today??” But it gets better I promise! And it helps make a few things a lot easier down the road like: Your kids will remember what THEY did and they won’t want it ruined because of the work they put into it, they will respect the plants because they know it takes work to get them to grow, they will get faster and more efficient with the garden chores, and they will be helpful at a fairly young age. Plus! if you give them their own tools they will feel pretty cool and actually want to help out, AND they will quit stealing your tools and hiding them all over the yard when you need them most!

5. Plant Extra! Things happen people, toddlers will walk through the plants and snap them off right at the bottom so they can’t be saved, kids will pull up entire plants while trying to pick a juicy strawberry or a crisp pea, they will forget where they are supposed to dig, and they will definitely pull up plants while they are trying to help you weed. It’s going to happen, and it’s okay. Save yourself an entire year of stress by planting a ton of extra seeds so you can spare a few fatalities.

So there you have it! 5 of my best tips on making it just a little bit easier to garden with young kiddos. How bout you? You got any good ones?

BONUS: Take the kids on an adventure and make it fun for them to find and learn about the plants and produce. Here is an idea – Teach them how to forage for produce! Check out out our YouTube video to learn how to forage for asparagus.

~Farmer’s Wife

Farmhouse Garden Preserving The Harvest

Freeze ALL THAT asparagus … FAST!!

Asparagus season seems to come and go in a flash. It happens to be one of my kids favorite vegetables and luckily it grows in abundance around here. In fact, if we are paying close enough attention we can find several meals worth of wild asparagus just from walking along the ditches. (Check out this YouTube video to learn how you might be able to find asparagus around you! Or read this article to learn how to get free produce.) Then there is the kind neighbor that brings over some of their delicious garden bounty. And maybe you purchased some from the store a few days ago too because the sign said “local”. The problem is that there is so much of it at one time! We don’t want it to go to waste because it is SO GOOD! But honestly, you can only eat so much bacon wrapped asparagus in the month of April.

So what can you do with ALL THAT asparagus?? Aside from eating it for every single meal … The fastest fix for too much asparagus that I have found is to chop it up and freeze it. Now there is a little bit more to it then that so let me explain how to do it so your asparagus will be flavorful and delicious instead of mushy and bland. Because NO kid, except maybe the baby, is going to eat mushy and bland asparagus without a fight!

First off, you will need some asparagus … That could probably go without saying but hey, I am being thorough here okay! The fresher the better because every minute after it is picked, some of the flavor and texture is lost.

Now fill your sink with cold water and dump your spears in. Give it a good swish around and leave them there for a minute.

Gather your supplies ….

Large pot to blanch (cook) the asparagus in, filled 2/3 with water
2 large bowls, 1 for the waste and one for the good part
Ziploc bags, I use freezer quarts
towel on top of a cookie sheet, to put the washed asparagus on and transport easily
cutting board
large knife
large slotted spoon
tongs if you would like (I didn’t actually end up using them because the slotted spoon did the trick)

Head back over to the sink and start washing. Pay special attention to the broken ends, they get little bits of dirt packed in them and then you get gritty asparagus … which will also be a problem with the kids. Pile your washed spears on the cookie sheet with the towel. I also check the asparagus when washing for any that have the tops broken off or look too mature. I am pretty picky with it because we usually have so much. Put your giant pot on the stove and turn it on high right now too so it’s ready when you are.

Take your cookie sheet of clean asparagi (that’s got to be a word right?) to your table or counter for cutting. Take a handful and set them on your cutting board all facing the same direction. Line up the bottoms with each other for faster cutting so you can do lots at one time. Then chop off the bottom portion and chuck it into your compost bowl. This part gets hard and not so tasty when it’s cooked.

If you are unsure where to cut it off you can do two things …. grab an asparagus and hold it with one hand in the middle of the spear and the other hand on the bottom end and bend it until it snaps OR you can look at it and cut just above the lighter, hard end part thingy. That sounded very scientific I know. If you are worried about it then cut a little higher then you think you should and you will be just fine.

After you discard the nasty bottoms, chop the rest of the yummy part up in 1-2 inch chunks and put them in your other bowl. I am putting that in bold for me because I kept tossing my yummies into my compost bowl.

Take your bowl full of cut asparagus over to the stove. Is your water boiling? Good! Leave your stove on high, and using your slotted spoon, scoop some asparagus into the giant pot but stop putting it in when the water stops boiling. It was about five scoops for me. Set the timer on your oven for 1 minute and 30 seconds and hit start as soon as the water has come back to a boil. This part is called blanching. You do this to help preserve the asparagus better. It will retain its flavor and texture better if you do this correctly. Don’t stress it too much though, if you’re off by a bit the asparagus won’t kill you.

Also while your asparagus is boiling, fill your sink with COLD water and toss a few ice cubes in.

When the timer goes off, carry your pot over to the sink and scoop your asparagus directly into the cold ice water. This will stop the cooking process and complete your blanching which equals much yummier asparagus later, yay!

Leave it there for a few minutes so it can cool completely. I just left it there while I blanched the next little bit. Then when they are almost done cooking, scoop out the cold ones onto the cookie sheet with the towel again to dry a bit, you didn’t toss that towel into the laundry room already did you?

Keep cooking, cooling, and scooping onto the towel until all the asparagus is blanched. At this point I was thinking the asparagus looked pretty darn delicious! And we are almost done! All that’s left to do is label your bags and fill ’em up. I fill mine a little less than half full so that if I don’t need the whole bag at once I can easily break off some of it and leave the rest in the freezer.

Oh ya and they stack better because you can flatten them.

And there you have it! Beautiful, delicious asparagus to put in the freezer for later instead of going moldy in the fridge. My favorite way to use this is in a stir fry but there are a million and one other things you could do with it.

Maybe this year I will get it all done before any goes to waste!

~Farmer’s Wife

Farmhouse School Learning Activities

How to make edible play sand

It’s Tinker Tuesday at the farmhouse and today we are playing with incredibly AWESOME homemade edible sand. Seriously guys, check out these colors! They turned out so cool that I spent half an hour taking pictures of the bright sand before I could hand it all over to the kids!

I had been wanting to do this project for Tinker Tuesday for quite awhile now but I kept putting it off because I was afraid it would take a lot of prep time. It turns out I was wrong. It only took me about 20 minutes to get it all mixed up and then I let it dry over night. I fought off the kids for awhile in the morning taking pictures and then finally let them loose on my beautiful … untainted … sand … sigh …

I was happily surprised to see that it was almost as pretty when the colors were mixed together.

Little man (6) scooped and mixed and buried things in his colorful sand for about 45 minutes. Boss (2) poured and poured for 20 minutes, then wanted me to wash his hands, then came back 10 minutes later and played for another 10 minutes bringing his grand total to 30 minutes of tinker time. And Sweetie Pie (4) who LOVES pretty colors, scooped, stirred, spilled, and cleaned her colorful sand for a whopping hour and a half! Then she made me save her mixed sand in a ziploc bag for later. She even washed all the spoons, scoops, and tupperware for me after we were done.

Now I would call this a successful tinkering!

And I bet your just itching to have a giant colorful sand pile in your kitchen too right?!?!

Here’s what ya need:

1 bag of pure cane sugar
food coloring
ziploc bags (I used sandwich size bags)

Pour some pure cane sugar into your bags.

I wanted six colors and I was making sand for three kids to play with. I used one 4 lb bag of pure cane sugar and it turned out just perfect. If I had made more, I am certain my kids would have used it all but this was plenty of sand for them to make a big giant beautiful mess with and not too much to make me crazy! So I filled 6 sandwich baggies not quite half way with pure cane sugar and set them all in a line on my table for the next step.

2. Add food coloring

Decide what colors you want to do before jumping right in. I chose yellow, orange, red, purple, blue, and green. Then grab a bag and get to coloring! I started with 10 drops but ended up adding another 5 to most of them. You can make it as bright as you want by adding more food coloring.

3. Mix it up!

Make sure to close the bag tight! leave a little air in there to make the mixing easier. Squeeze, squish, shake, or any other S word you prefer to get the job done just don’t squeeze or shake too vigorously! One of my bags popped open and within half a second my kitchen floor was covered in orange sand. Now that I think about it, I should have just left it there for the kids to go crazy with! Ah there is always next time right? ….. Maybe outside ….

4. Let it dry

Thats it! Then you just open the bags up and let them dry a bit. I left mine overnight and we didn’t have any stained fingers.

5. Play, dang it!

You could set up your play space anywhere you want really! The kitchen table, outside on the cement, on the trampoline, even in the bath tub (hey it would make for easy clean up right?!) We did it on the kitchen table. I put my sand in little cups so they could pour or scoop, and I gave them a whole bunch of containers, scoopers, spoons, and anything else I could find laying around in the kitchen. Then I took a deep breath …………………….. and called the kids!

Bonus! It’s sugar! so let the kids taste their art!

and finally a warning, it was totally worth it but it was one of our messier Tinker Tuesdays. Sand was everywhere when we finally got done and it got a little sticky on the floor where I spilled a bunch and it got walked on. So I suppose mopping the floor should be the last instruction.

All in all, this turned out way cool! Life on this family farm is full of messes, usually involving dirt, so it was kinda nice to have a beautiful mess of delicious colorful sand for a change!

And now for the big moment!……. the random farm fact of the day is …..

Some regions in Africa, where large amounts of sugar cane are grown, they actually use the dry fibrous material left over (known as bagasse) to create electricity! Hmmm I wonder if it smells like sugar cookies when they burn it?? Cool!

In case you need other creative ideas to add to your homeschool week – check out this other Tinker Tuesday article.

Now get out of here and go make a beautiful mess with your kids! Then come back and let me know how it goes!

~Farmer’s Wife

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Cloth Diaper… Part Time!

So you’re wondering about cloth diapering eh? When I first considered it I was a little nervous it would be too much to take on. I didn’t know if I could handle the extra work of something that’s already a huge hassle.

But ….. I decided to try it because I really, really, REALLY hate blowing so much flipping money on boxes of diapers. I also very much dislike having to buy multiple boxes for multiple kids at the same time. My kids are pretty close together so two years ago I had two kids in diapers and 1 kid in pullups at nights. So every time I made my big trips to the store I was buying three boxes! AHHHH! I have nightmares about it. So when Munch was born I decided I couldn’t do that again. I tried cloth diapering full time for the first couple weeks and it just wasn’t working for me so I adjusted my approach to part-time cloth diapering, and it’s been working quite well for several months now.

It’s easier for me, saves us some money, and he doesn’t seem to mind me switching all the time, but then who can complain when someone else is giving you clean pants right? Even if sometimes they are soft and fuzzy and sometimes they are cold and itchy.

Our schedule usually goes about like this: (affiliate link included)

When we are home during the day, Munch wears cloth diapers, which I purchased from Amazon and you can check them out here in your interested. When I change him into pajamas, I put him in a disposable diaper for the night because they seem to leak less. Then first thing in the morning, it’s back to soft and fuzzy cloth. We are home quite a bit, and so it’s no big deal to use cloth diapers at home, but I have found that it is much less convenient when I am gone. So every time we go somewhere for longer than an hour or two, I take disposables instead. Easy peasy!

I figure every time I use a cloth diaper instead of a disposable I save just a little bit of money and I am being a little “greener” so I do it whenever I can. But I also don’t like to feel stressed about it, so I don’t! If it’s gonna be stressful then I put him in a disposable. I only go through about 50 disposable diapers a month this way, so my diaper bill is WAY down compared to what I spent on my other kiddos. And another bonus is I don’t have to buy huge boxes of diapers anymore I just get small packages every once in awhile. Yay! No more needing an extra cart just for all my diaper boxes! Now if I could just get Boss potty trained ….

So maybe you’re considering cloth diapers but it seems too overwhelming and stressful?? Try what I do and cloth diaper part time, no stress about it! Just start with a few diapers and use them whenever you’re home. Then add a few more and a few more until you have a little stash and cloth diaper whenever you want! Every time you use cloth instead of disposable, it’s a little bit more money in your pocket and one less diaper in a landfill. Take it one diaper at a time!

Anybody else cloth diaper part time? I wanna hear your methods!

P.S. Check out this article that list 50 ways to become more self sufficient. Part time cloth diapering is on the list – see what else is!

~Farmer’s Wife