Is it sap season yet?

This time of year, any hint of warmth has us wondering, "is it time yet?"
Friday afternoon, we decided it must be, as it was warm enough to go out without coats.

With great excitement, we headed off to the backyard, drill in hand.

Everyone got a chance to turn the drill.

We were treated to an immediate reward: the sap was running!
Oh, how I love that "drip, drip, drip!"

The next day was frigid, but we'd gotten some new buckets, so we set out again to tap more trees.

Naturally, it's been freezing cold since then, so we haven't begun boiling. But it's coming!

Books to read while the dehydrator runs

Here's the second installment of my book list for our "squirreling away" project. These are the books the kids and I are reading about apples.


The Apple and the Moth by Iela and Enzo Mari.
A recent book-sale find, in horrible condition, but oh so worth reading anyway. While we're picking apples, gorging on apples, and smelling the apples in the dehydrator, it's fascinating to "read" this book about the life cycle of a moth, taking place in an apple tree. The moth lays an egg in the flower--and so is then inside the apple as it forms--and the caterpillar has to bite its way out? Somehow I missed that in biology class, and loved learning it here! I love the simple, bold illustration style, too.


The Apple Pie Tree by Zoe Hall and Shari Halpern.
When we went to pick crab apples recently, one of the children commented that he remembered visiting when the trees were fully in bloom. This is another good book for showing the life of an apple tree through all the seasons, with the end of the story being "there's nothing as good as an apple pie you grew yourself."


Apples and Pumpkins by Anne Rockwell and Lizzy Rockwell.
Oh, so sweet and nostalgic (remember when you could give away apples as treats at Halloween? This book does...). When I read "we go to the Comstock farm to pick apples and pumpkins," Lucy is riveted. It's her experience, exactly. I love the innocence of this one, perfect for toddlers.


Apple Farmer Annie by Monica Wellington.
There's something about this book that makes kids ask for it again and again. I like that the farmer is a woman. And that it's simple enough for a toddler, but shows everything from harvesting apples to making cider to baking with them to selling all the products at market. And I appreciate all the signs and border illustrations that invite lots of discussion beyond the story.

Coming up next...books about squirrels and other animal food gatherers.

By the way...if you click on a link and find yourself at IndieBound, and then buy a book through there from your local independent bookstore, I should theoretically earn a bit of change (hasn't happened yet). If you find yourself at Librarything, it's because IndieBound didn't have it and I want you to see the book without finding yourself at an online giant retailer.

Books to read while the canning pot boils

I promised I'd share a booklist for what I've come to think of as our "squirreling away" project (our current investigation of storing up food for winter, focused in part on the comparison between us and animals, especially squirrels.) The books we're reading now have some overlap with last year's autumn book basket, but as we read, we have a different perspective found through the lens of our recent experiences foraging, collecting acorns, making jelly, and picking and eating apples.

I'm afraid this might become a marathon post, so I'll break it into a few smaller ones (you know I tend to go on and on about children's books!). These are the food-storage by humans ones.

Have I told you about Librarything? It's one of my all-time favorite online tools. I've used it to catalog all my books. It's super-helpful for teachers or parents who want to follow up on children's very specific interests, because you can tag all your books with whatever keywords you want. After years of going to the school librarian asking "can you think of any books about string?" (for one of my most-frustrating examples) and ending up with only one non-fiction title from the computer card catalog, I am thrilled to be able to find all the books I've got that show inspiring uses of string. (If your kids--like many of those in my past classes--happen to be into string, you may be interested in my collection of books tagged "string,"or in the books tagged "string" by anyone on librarything.)

So, for example, as I began to notice the children's interest in all the food preservation that was going on around them, and in acorns, and squirrels, I searched my librarything catalog for "food storage," "canning," "squirrels," "acorns," "apples," and "foraging." Here are some that I chose from those that came up (for a group that's currently a 1 1/2-year-old, 3 2-year-olds, a 3-year-old, and a 4-year-old).

Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey. Of course. Is there any more classic, more beautiful story about the experience of gathering food for the winter? And it's about both people and animals. And that picture of the kitchen on the endpapers? I could move right in, and I find myself spending as much time discussing that illustration as reading the rest of the book! (And the fact that Sal is playing with a spoon and canning rings rather than toys? Perfect.)


Autumn Story by Jill Barklem. The mice gather berries just as we're doing. And the illustrations of their well-stocked pantry shelves full of canning, and ceilings strung with drying food, and baskets and baskets of berries covering the floor? Fabulous.


Let's Find Out About Fall by Martha and Charles Shapp. One of the advantages of vintage books is that they come with vintage assumptions: like everyone's gathering stuff from their garden and preserving it for winter. Just a brief mention, here, but I like normalizing "weird" habits like local eating by having them come up in many ways in many books.


Frederick by Leo Lionni. A twist on the old "The Ant and the Grasshopper" fable, except that here, the "lazy" one is an artist, gathering the sun rays and colors and words the others will need as their food stores run low. A good reminder of the different gifts we each contribute to our communities.


Hurry, Hurry, Mary Dear by N. M. Bodecker and Erik Blegvad. What a score when I came across this one at a library sale! "Pick the apples, dill the pickles, chop down trees for wooden nickels. Dig the turnips, split the peas, cook molasses, curdle cheese." Etc, etc, etc...all the tasks Mary takes on to prepare for winter, while her husband lazes about. Great illustrations, so much to talk about, and a reflection of all the skills (and more) I'm trying to learn and share with the kids.

By the way...if you click on a link and find yourself at IndieBound, and then buy a book through there from your local independent bookstore, I should theoretically earn a bit of change (hasn't happened yet). If you find yourself at Librarything, it's because IndieBound didn't have it and I want you to see the book without finding yourself at an online giant retailer.

Coming up next...books about apples and acorns and squirrels, oh, my!

By 9 am

I'm getting much better at squeezing in small amounts of food storage whenever I have a bit of time, rather than doing all of it in marathon sessions that keep me up until the wee hours (though lots of it does still happen that way). We had a half peck of peaches at peak ripeness, and a bag of apples given to us by a parent in my program ("can you use these? They're kind of spotty..."). So this morning, as the coffee perked, I cut up apples and put them on the stove to cook. After breakfast, Lucy and I ran them through the food mill and put the sauce into jars. As they processed, I peeled peaches, greeting the arriving children in my apron with peaches in my hands. They went into the canner just as the last child arrived, so I was able to begin my day with them with a bit more fruit for our shelves. (Then we sat down to a snack of toast with the crabapple-wild grape jelly we'd foraged and cooked up together...mmm! I'd made that yesterday when one of the kids came in asking "how's that jam coming?" Umm...not at all...I'd forgotten to finish it. It was just a bit, so we didn't can it, but popped it in the fridge for some immediate gratification.)

Independence Days challenge: green beans

Time again for Sharon's Independence Day's Challenge, already? I've been a slacker blogger this week! Sorry. Summer's a crazy time around here, and it's been hot, hot, hot!! (Makes me grumpy.) Here's my meager update.

2. Harvest something:
Eggs. Grape tomatoes. 11 lbs. green beans from our CSA.

3. Preserve something:
4 1/2 pts. pickled beets with anise. 25 pts frozen green beans. 2 qts. frozen stock.

7. Eat the food:
Lots of zucchini-nut muffins. A rice-lentil-carrot-cabbage-basil salad that came out surprisingly well (with mayo/lemon juice dressing). Another, also good (I think I may actually be learning how to make up recipes--finally, at 41!): chick peas, lemon juice, lots of basil, grated carrots and turnips, chopped lettuce and scallions. Delicious zucchini cakes (our new favorite recipe is from Nourishing Traditions). Sweet and sour chard over rice.

Independence Days challenge: the container garden is working!

Time again for Sharon's Independence Day's Challenge:

1. Plant something:
Well, I haven't planted anything this week. But I've tended my pots, and I'm thrilled--they're working! I grew things from seed and they're actually growing. Look at those beans, reaching for the sky! And the kidney beans and cucumbers are covered in blooms. Yay!

2. Harvest something:
3/4 lb. purple potatoes (total harvest from one trash can; very disappointing! Wonder what I did wrong this time...). A few more grape tomatoes. Sunflowers, basil, and rosemary from our CSA.

3. Preserve something:
7 1/2 pts. plum jam using this recipe (way more sugar than I normally like to use, but I liked this recipe's simple plan for seed removal and don't trust myself enough to mess with recipes yet). 5 pts. plum jam using the low-sugar Pomona pectin recipe. 4 1/2 qts. dill pickles. 2 pts. anise beets. Dried a bit each of carrots, rosemary, and greens for the chickens.

5. Preparation and storage:
Had a bit of good luck at tag sales this weekend: got a hand drill and a collection of drill bits, a life jacket, and a child-sized spade. And I got a handful of wonderful vintage children's sewing patterns at a thrift store, as well as a pile of great children's books.

7. Eat the food:
A good potato salad with green beans and hard-boiled eggs. Raspberry-plum-lettuce popsicles. Lots of carrots and zucchini. A pretty-good grilled zucchini pizza (would have been really good if I could learn to make a better crust.) Tomatoes straight out of the garden. Nothing particularly interesting, but fresh and good.

Plum jam 2 ways

Please excuse my slow mid-week posting lately. For some, summer's a slower, more relaxed time. For us, summer's when life kicks up a notch in intensity--I'm focusing on the current children's work, prepping for four kids to move on to kindergarten, working on enrollment for next year, prepping for the new children, taking care of my own family, and constantly preparing food for storage for the winter. It's a whirlwind.

So imagine me one day this week with 6 children under 6--several using glue guns while they work on their boats; Lucy under my feet or on the counter beside me--processing 12 qts of plums which had to be dealt with immediately (i.e. a day ago; some were already rotting). Crazy!

(Wondering how to can with a 17-month-old? The best moments were these... Lucy sat on the counter beside me with a huge bowl of plums. Her job was to hand me each one so I could slice it with a knife and put it in the pot. That lasted a good while. When she tired of that, she moved on to the floor, where she used doled out small handfuls of catfood into the children's pots and pans and little dishes for a good long time. The resulting mess was well worth it. The less-fun moments involve a hot toddler in a hot sling while I twist my body away from the boiling jam on the stove as I stir...)

I never really trust myself with jam. I sometimes make it too runny, sometimes too hard. So I don't tend to experiment much, though I really dislike the high quantity of sugar used in most recipes. Since the tiny plums were new to me and I didn't know how to get out all those pits without way too much work, I read a ton of recipes looking for the perfect technique. I found one that said if you slit the plums, then cook them, the pits would rise to the surface and you could scoop them out. Perfect. So I made that for my first batch. Insanely sweet (equal parts fruit and sugar), but gorgeous--the longish boiling time resulted in a glowing jam that looks like marmalade (the one on the right). It would make great gifts.

Then I decided to try Pomona pectin. I have a strange aversion to adding pectin--it seems artificial, plus it's one more ingredient I have to buy. I generally use high-pectin fruits instead, or my own pectin, made from quince. But I'd heard such good things about Pomona, and it lets you use so much less sugar. Sure enough, it worked beautifully, setting up with a very short cook time (added bonus!). It looks completely different--more like a butter than a jam. I'll serve this one to the kids (they don't get the super sugary stuff from me; I'm mean like that!). I'll be using the Pomona again; I liked its ease.

12 1/2 pts of plum jam, stored. On to blueberries...

Independence Days: filling the freezer with fruit

Time again for Sharon's Independence Day's Challenge:

1. Plant something:
I'm just happy I didn't kill anything more this week! The container garden loved the heat this week--I can't believe how much the beans grew!

2. Harvest something:
12 qts. cherry plums foraged from a nearby park. 6 qts. raspberries from a pick-your-own farm. Eggs. The last few of our snap peas. The usual garden snacking (Lucy's learned to ask "mint?" just before picking and eating some). Our first grape tomato (which was then cut into 6 equal portions to be shared by the kids at lunch) :-).

3. Preserve something:
5 pts. pickled beets. 8 qts. frozen raspberries.

4. Waste not:
I've started tucking re-usables into my shopping bags so I won't forget them. Yogurt containers and berry boxes go into our CSA bag, because they'll re-use them. Coffee bags go into a specific bag for the co-op, so we can re-fill it. Makes remembering much easier!

5. Preparation and storage:
Our stores are woefully low. We're re-stocking slowly: a few extra jars of coconut oil, a few of peanut butter, a few recycled bottles filled with water.

6. Build community food systems:
I told several people about the cherry-plum discovery. And, of course, being the wacko on the side of the road with a basket always invites looks and inquiries. It feels like my small little contribution to educating the world about the possibilities of foraging.

7. Eat the food:
Lots and lots of popsicles. Favorite flavors this week:
strawberry/yogurt
strawberry/spinach/coconut milk
blueberry/summer squash/spinach/water
Lots and lots of kale. Kale chips, of course. And a surprisingly-good what's-in-the-fridge concoction that all the kids liked (loose recipe below). It was such a hit, I made it again today, and the kids kept saying "this is my favorite rice!" Potato salad, cucumber salad, green salad (salad was clearly a theme this week!). Lots of berries, just straight up. And just tonight, I conquered a fear of mine: I made a pie crust. I know, it's supposed to be easy. But I've always hated things I have to roll out--they get stuck to the rolling pin and rip and break. So I buy pre-made crusts. Or mostly, just avoid anything that requires a crust. But today, I did it! It's baking now, but it looked like it worked!

Spicy Kale, Eggs, and Rice
Chop a bunch of kale into small pieces. Saute in a bit of oil until bright green.
Push kale to the side of pan; break a few eggs into the pan, scramble, and cook.
Add cooked rice. Pour in lots of watery salsa (or salsa+water).
Cook until water is absorbed or evaporated.

My berry, your berry

I mentioned those cherry plums I'd recently discovered. The kids and I were in the park with nothing to do, and they spotted some yellow fruits on the ground. "What are these?" My first thought was unripe crabapples. But then why were they all over the ground? Then Lucy handed me one she'd bitten (yup, she's teething), and I saw a pit inside. I smelled it--it smelled like a plum. But it was tiny! I'd never heard of such a thing. So I looked it up, and found out they're called "cherry plums." They're about the size of cherries; they can be red or yellow; and they're often used as landscaping plants. Oh, how I love the person who, choosing landscaping plants for a public park, decided upon edible fruit trees! Shouldn't all parks have food we can share? Look at the bounty on just this one tree:

We picked some Saturday--probably a bit early, but I wanted to be really sure we didn't miss them. (I'm hoping they'll finish ripening at home, and then we'll make some jam.)

Andi hung from a branch to pull it low, I picked all I could reach, and Lucy picked up any we dropped on the ground. It was quick work for us to pick 12 quarts of plums.

Sunday was for raspberries. Never mind the humidity and heat in the 90s; we had to pick. We hadn't found a good pick-your-own raspberry place until this year, and they were too expensive to buy in quantity at farmer's markets, so we haven't done raspberry jam in a few years. But it's my favorite! Plus, I want more variety in our stored fruits this year, so I wanted some to freeze.

You can tell Lucy's been raised eating locally. We told her we were going to pick raspberries. She's never done that before, but clearly, pick-your-own is familiar to her. When we got to the farm, I handed her a box and without any further instruction, she went straight to the canes, picked a ripe berry, and dropped it in her box!

Of course, some went into her mouth, too.

And a few into her hat.

(I love these little collections vignettes she leaves behind wherever she goes!)

We only managed 6 quarts before we were melting too much to continue, but that should be enough to keep us busy for a while!

Now my mind is humming the picking-fruit songs. Saturday was "picking up cherry plums and putting them in the basket..." (originally pawpaws--and, hey, looking it up for you, I just learned a ton of new lyrics to this song!). Today was "three berry, four berry, my berry, your berry." Is it just me, or do you have a kids' song for every occasion?

Independence Days challenge: gardening in the heat

Time again for Sharon's Independence Day's Challenge:

1. Plant something:
Oh, dear. Not only did I not plant anything, I may well have killed several things. I tend to be a very lazy gardener; I put things in and hope they'll survive my neglect. That works fine with my perennial garden, but not so well with all the new edible plants I've been putting in. My 20 new salmonberry and thimbleberry bushes all dried up to a crisp this week with the heat and my neglectful ways. Is there any hope?

However, I'm not a complete gardening idiot. The pots we planted on the driveway are doing well, and nothing there got fried. I've been really happy with the "Mel's Mix" we've been using in the pots, described in Square Foot Gardening (1/3 compost, 1/3 soil, 1/3 vermiculite). The pots don't dry up too quickly, even though they're set on hot cement. And I have some tomato plants I bought as seedlings--I planted 4 in a pot, and running out of room, put the other 2 in the ground beside the pot. The ones in the pot are much larger and have green tomatoes all over them; the ones in the ground have a few flowers. I set the kids to work this week with sticks and string to make trellises for the vining plants. They did a great job, don't you think?

2. Harvest something:
Eggs. All 5 of our currants. (Will we ever have a real berry harvest?). Peas, basil, parsley from our CSA. Lavender, comfrey, black caps. Tried to harvest mulberries, but had missed them, they ripened so early this year! (Shoot!) However, I discovered something new--cherry plums--and foraged a few. Just waiting for the rest to ripen.

3. Preserve something:
Froze 4 pints peas. Dried comfrey for chickens' winter feed. Dried lavender.

5. Preparation and storage:
I spent this weekend cleaning, organizing, and weeding out. Took a load of stuff to the thrift store, and am feeling a lot more sane for it.

7. Eat the food:
We're going easy, easy, easy with meal prep. Examples: Local bread with butter, salt, and lettuce. Coleslaw of Chinese cabbage, scallions, and mayo. Whatever we can think of that will use greens and not require much of us. Sauteed zucchini. Carrots. Pesto.

A lot of peas

That's a lot of peas...
(for perspective, this is the tub we bathed Lucy in as an infant, and it's filled several inches deep)

...or is it? Took me an hour to pick them, a few hours to shell them, more time to blanch them and can them up for the freezer...all for just 4 pints. 4 pints?!?

That's our new definition of summer.
Pick it, prep it, preserve it. Repeat.

Thank goodness for our CSA, though. I remember the first time I shelled peas to freeze. I bought several pints at the farmer's market, shelled them, put them in a ziplock bag--a sandwich-sized ziplock bag--and realized the bag wasn't even full and it had cost me $10 plus labor!

These peas came pick-your-own at our farm. I was trying to take a fair share, not be too greedy... but the aisles were filled with knee-high weeds as if no one else was walking there, and the plants were loaded down with peas, so I picked a bunch. I kept thinking if I didn't, they'd go to waste. Is that true? I'll have to check it out next week and see how the plants are looking then.

Next up...foraged cherry plums. More on that to come.

Independence Days challenge: enjoying the last of the strawberries

Time again for Sharon's Independence Day's Challenge:

2. Harvest something:
Eggs. A few black-cap raspberries. A couple peas.
And this is why I need a farm share! Here's one day's "harvest" from my yard:

Now, granted, this was unusually small (and I could have added some greens, but it was farm pick-up day, so they were certainly not needed). But we don't get a whole lot more even on good days! Still working on that. In the meantime, our "harvest" comes mostly from local farms. At our CSA this week, we picked the last of the peas (not nearly as many as I'd have liked to, as we were on toddler-at-the-end-of-the-day time). And we returned to the berry farm and picked 6 more quarts (would have liked to get more, but the pickins were slim this week). While there, we also gathered some red clover growing in the blueberry-field paths.

3. Preserve something:
Dried 1 pt. red clover and 1 1/2 pts. strawberries. Froze 1/2 pint garlic scape pesto, 1 1/2 qts. veggie stock, and 4 pints snap peas.

4. Waste not:
I seem to always skip this section, because we don't do anything noteworthy, just what's become habit. But maybe it's worth mentioning some of it anyway. What comes quickly to mind: all kitchen scraps go to the chickens; everything we can is recycled (not much, as I try to limit purchases, packaging, plastic, etc.); glass containers are re-used for storage of dry foods and leftovers; kids' wading-pool water is emptied with kid-sized watering cans to water the gardens; "craft supplies" lining the studio shelves are actually beautiful stuff saved from the trash; all laundry is line dried; we use hankies, cloth napkins, rags, cloth pads, and cloth diapers rather than disposables... That's some of it, anyway. I think we do pretty well with this.

5. Preparation and storage:
Did some tag-sale and thrift-store shopping this week and found a few basics: cotton sheets, a brand-new pair of shoes for Lucy when she's bigger, a muffin tin to replace my worn-out one (the old one went outside for the kids' mudpie play).

7. Eat the food:
The kids ate strawberry "pops" for snacks this week (the biggest strawberries, stuck on a stick and frozen), and strawberry-spinach smoothies. We ate lots of coleslaw, salads, and rice with stir-fries (mostly greens). And more radish-butter sandwiches on yummy local bread. Oh, and a strawberry cuppa-cuppa-cuppa. We've pretty much been eating strawberries for every meal.

Independence Days challenge update: strawberries!

Apparently, I don't blog well on nice-weather weekends! (Didn't help that our camera's acting up and we got no photos of the world's most picturesque strawberry-picking day or our beach-with-friends day...) So, here it is, time again for Sharon's Independence Day's Challenge:

(back from the farm, we set up outdoors to prep the strawberries for the freezer)

1. Plant something:
Hablitzia (climbing perennial spinach)--I was excited to discover a perennial-vegetable plant stand at the farmer's market this week! I asked what would grow in shade, and this is what he recommended; I remembered having read about it in my forest gardening book, once he mentioned it. I added two of them to my fledgling forest garden.

Roma tomatoes, more double yield cucumbers, and light red kidney beans from seed in pots on the driveway. (My neighbor came home from vacation, and seeing our new pots-on-driveway garden, asked if we needed any more containers. Yes, we do! She lent us two ceramic planters and a metal refrigerator drawer, so we put in more seeds. I know I'm getting a too-late start on some of these seeds, but I figure we might as well put them in and see what happens.)

(peas in our under-clothesline planter box)
2. Harvest something:
Eggs. Good King Henry, swiss chard. Chives and mint by the kids, doing their daily garden snacking. Foraged elder flowers. 15 quarts strawberries (After years of looking, we finally found organic pick-your-own strawberries on a wonderful farm. We'll be back soon; 15 quarts is not enough. But it's what Lucy could stand in the heat.) A few peas from our garden. One black-cap raspberry! :-)

3. Preserve something:
I discovered tons of elder growing at our CSA and worked up the nerve to ask if I could take some flowers. They said yes, so I made elder flower tincture. We also froze 12 quarts of the strawberries.

5. Preparation and storage:
Added a jar of water to storage.

(potatoes growing in a trash can in our garden)

6. Build community food systems:
Nothing much, though we did make plans to bring friends back to the farm to pick strawberries.

7. Eat the food:

(happy strawberry-stained baby)
Salad. Kale chips. Strawberries with corn cake (mmmm). Strawberry lemonade (lemons are my one non-local produce exception, but even still, lemonade is a rare treat for us). Tons of just-plain strawberries. Radish sandwiches. Snap peas. Lots of simple picnic-y fare.

Going to the farm

Wednesday is quickly becoming one of our favorite days of the week, because it's the day we go to the farm. I can't even begin to describe how wonderful it feels to go to "our" farm to pick out the veggies we want, surrounded by new people we're finding we really like who share our values about local food and sustainability (and dear old friends, too!), letting Lucy play with the animals and giving her a chance to see our food growing in the fields... Oh, it's too much. I tried to capture a bit of it in photos this evening, but I didn't do it justice. You'll just have to put up with a few posts on our farm visits this summer.

The board that helps us figure out what we can get.

For the most part, we can just stuff a big huge bag with whatever we choose. Tonight, we got spinach, beets, radishes, turnips, Chinese cabbage, fennel, dill, scallions, kale, and peas.

Our little farm girl. She must have known what day it was when she reached into the drawer this morning and insistently announced "this!" as she chose her chicken shirt. (I love that they have farm-themed toys for the kids to play with while we're there.)

One of my favorite parts--shaved ice from this awesome machine! The ice is topped with fruit syrups they make themselves; I chose strawberry today. How awesome is that machine? And you've got to love a farmer who wears his baby on his back...

Lucy, heading off to the fields to pick peas.

Love this old truck!

Mmmm.

Independence Days Challenge: garden in pots

Lavender, ready to be harvested and dried.

Time again for Sharon's Independence Day's Challenge:

1. Plant something:
The kids and I planted a garden-in-pots on top of our second driveway, in one of the only tiny bits of frequent sunniness we have. I didn't have nearly enough pots for all the seeds we wanted to plant (our planned-for guerrila-gardening raised bed has been abandoned for now, as the location proved to be much shadier than we'd remembered.) But we made do with what we had, and are trying Kentucky Wonder beans, Moonglow tomatoes, Blondkopfchen tomatoes, Straight Eight cucumbers, Double Yield cucumbers, German chamomile, and Boston Yarrow squash (all of these go toward the Growing Challenge). It rained most of the week, and the beans and chamomile are already sprouting.

Chamomile sprouting. Teensy tiny seeds plus toddler hands equals very crowded seedlings!

2. Harvest something:
Eggs. Foraged elder flowers.

The herb garden, picked over by children and chickens (notice the nearly-leafless comfrey--you can tell how tall the chickens are by how high its stalk is bare).

3. Preserve something:
Froze 2 qts spinach. Drying elder flowers.

Our first tomatoes appeared this week.

5. Preparation and storage:
Added several jars of peanut butter and coconut oil to the basement, trying to restore our depleted supplies.

My potted Meyer lemon tree has doubled in size with all this rain.

7. Eat the food:
I finally made kale chips (well, I've made them in the past, but I finally made them without burning them...) and the kids loved them. Sure to become a regular lunch item. I used up some of our many frozen-last-year red peppers to make a roasted red pepper sauce for spaghetti. The kids and I ate bread with radish butter and salt (yummy for those of us who dared try it. Gotta do the 10-times-more thing for a few of them...). We're eating lots of greens, of course: salad, swiss chard, bok choy and (new at the market this week)--broccoli!