Reason #365 to homeschool: learning for yourself, too

We spent some time in our garden this weekend. This is the time of year that we are in the garden the most: it's a great time to put in plants, it's an important time to weed, it's sunny but not too hot. This weekend in the garden we discovered an enemy in the form of the Colorado Potato Beetle. It's the larvae that caught my attention—fat little grub like things dressed to look like a lady bug—all over one of my plants. Upon closer inspection we discovered several leaves with eggs, and probably almost fifty of the fat, greedy little larvae themselves. We don't have any potatoes planted, and they were light bug-years away from our vegetable gardens, but there they were nonetheless. Since as a family we honor and respect all life (it's with a certain amount of horror that I watch other children deliberately and triumphantly squash bugs on the sidewalk) there was a somewhat unwelcome lesson to be learned and taught as we systematically eradicated (squashed) the entire colony and even removed the plant to the fire pit. Our first family case of "it's either us or them."

Before this weekend I'd had no idea of their existence—none at all—and now I live in mortal fear of these insects decimating my eggplant (because next to potatoes I guess that's what they like best). It's a real fear, because last year we lost the last of our tomato crop to a giant tomato hornworm, and the year before that we lost the last of our squash plants to squash bugs. Thanks to our gardens we sure are getting to know a lot of pests. As Jon said to me over the insect carnage in our street this past weekend "Why haven't I ever seen these things before? Where have they been? Where did they come from?" He is talking about not only all these dangerous bugs, but also about new plants, animals, birds, ecological situations, that we've discovered together over the past couple of years between gardening and nature hikes and all manner of exploration.

With or without homeschooling in our lives we were likely to run into the aforementioned terrors, but without our inquisitive five year old we might have handled the problem and been done with it. Instead, we've learned about these creatures and about coexisting with them. And bugs aren't the only thing; homeschooling with Calvin has pushed me out of my standard comfort zone and has given me a reason, a need even, to become a perpetual learner in all fields. The flipside of that coin, of course, is that anyone who is willing and able to learn can homeschool, all it requires is the audacity to believe that it can be done.

No, I'm not a rocket scientist, but I can help my son learn how to find the answers he seeks or get the help that he needs to start down the path to become one if he should so choose. I'm not an agriculturalist, either, but after this weekend I can tell you a lot about the Colorado Potato Beetle, including how to get and keep them out of your garden.

Looks like summer

Again I have not much more to share than pictures. We've spent two days working in the gardens again, plus some reading and some games and some usual, usual stuff. In the garden we raised our vegetable gardens further, added more dirt, marked them off by the square foot, and planted them. That took some of yesterday and much of this afternoon. In other news I worked the book sale this morning (and came home with nothing remarkable) and we went to the Dexter Ice Cream Social after, where Calvin enjoyed the bounce house, the ponies, the ice cream, and we all enjoyed a hay ride. I love our little village. And we have a new vintage/antiques store. We stopped in on our way to the car after the social (and before we got home and gardened in the 90 degree heat) and Calvin was having such a great time admiring all the stuff (where did he learn to do that???) that the owner told us to be sure and bring him back because "he might have the gene," by which I assume he is referring to a retro-loving gene, but I'm not entirely sure.

There wasn't much else to the day, but the evening held a visit from gram and grandpa (who seem to know automatically when we will be exhausted from yard/house work and need not only food but also good company) and an inaugural run for the fire pit. It works. It even makes s'mores.

Beware the s'more monster. He has a chocolate face and beady eyes and because we're up late he's not getting enough sleep. That, after all, is what summer is for.

And the garden is almost done, although we still have more room. We are still on a squash and broad leaf planting break thanks to the squash bugs that got us two years ago (everything I've read said wait three years before trying again), but we've filled our plots with a variety of tomatoes, some peppers (purple peppers!), broccoli, cauliflower, chard, eggplant, and beans. Tomorrow we're headed out to chose other (or more of the same) for the remaining plots. This is our first year with square foot gardening, which you can see we are not following squarely, since you are not supposed to have the same food in abutting squares and our tomatoes are abutting all over the place, but it's a learning process, and we're going to learn this year just how important that spacing really is (although the trial and error method is a bad one here since results depend on other outside variables). Here's hoping for good crops this year.

Let's roast marshmallows

For as long as we've lived in this house the three-day holiday weekends that bookend the summer season have been entirely filled with time consuming, labor intensive projects, mostly yard related (the summary of which can be found here). We've taken out umpteen square feet of sod, planted scores of native wildlife enticing plants, and spread copious amounts of dirt in new gardens. We've dug trenches, moved rocks, altered drainage. And every holiday weekend left us dirty, tired and sore. Today we did the one and only thing on our yard to-do list: we put in a fire pit. It took a handful of hours and a relatively small amount of back-breaking work. Now we don't know what to do with ourselves. And so we sit, enjoying the view of our new fire pit but wholly unable to use it since it started raining only minutes after we finished and took pictures, and has not stopped since.

Calvin helped with measuring and leveling—tools are fun—but once we started working the yard was so muddy he chose to spend most of the time reading, sitting in his play house, or playing with Legos instead. He's performing a re-enactment of the Battle of Troy right now, a slightly more gentle version of the Battle of Troy in which a magical horse makes sure that all the fighting is fair and safe and dragons are ready at any moment to step in and enforce the rules.

Calvin and I have a project we've been working on for a few days now, too. An indoor project, with lots of colored paper and glue, to keep us busy on all these rainy days. I suspect we'll finish it up tomorrow morning and I'll get to share it then.

The weather reports are promising warmth and sun for the remainder of the weekend once we get past the morning tomorrow. I hope they are right. Not only is that more enjoyable than the chilly rains we've had for about a week, but our yard, our whole region, needs the chance to dry out.

Choices

I'm sharing today. Another homeschooling mom, whose blog I try to frequent, recently shared a link that I would in turn like to share here. The article, "giving choices and setting boundaries", could be the written instruction booklet for how we've tried to approach parenting at our house. I was glad to find that we are in good company, and that someone has done the work of writing it down so eloquently. After almost five years (five!) we have found the philosophy of offering choices instead of demands to work very well, not because it leads to good behavior, but because it provides a sense of, and an ability for, independence. In the end that sense of individuality breeds self respect, which is what the rest of the world rather degradingly calls good behavior. It's a matter of perspective, or so my son tells me.

There was no rain today. None! We spent the morning on swimming, library, and a few other chores, but the afternoon we spent in the garden and then in the house with books and Legos, the windows open, the breeze blowing through, bringing the smells and sounds of a beautiful late spring day.

Garden sale

What's almost as good as the monthly library book sale? The annual garden club plant sale. Local plants, cultivated locally by local gardeners. With all that new garden footage in the back yard to fill we did quite a bit of shopping today, and then we spent the warm, sunny afternoon planting our fifteen some odd new plants (which cost us but a song and supported a local club). We also stopped by the locally owned garden center for some dirt, and explored their ornamental pond while there, something we do every year...because it's always home to a frog or two.

And normally after a day of planting I'd be thankful for the rain that is gently falling outside right now, watering the newly installed plants, but really, I think we've had enough rain this week.