Signs of Spring: More Eggs!

There is snow on the ground and it's cold outside. In Colorado, March tends to be the snowiest month, and this year is an El Nino year so we're due to have several big wet spring snows. Spring feels really far away. Even spring planting in the garden like peas and spinach feel painfully far off.

But we've just begun to see one sign of spring. Our chickens are laying more eggs. All winter, with the shorter days and winter molting, we've gotten no more than one egg a day from our small flock of four birds. But in the last week, they've begun laying three eggs a day. We give them no artificial light or heat; it's the longer days that is kicking them into higher production. This is the first spring we will have chickens, as they are just about a year old now. I'm enjoying the unexpected sign that spring really is on its way.

Obviously this is why Ostara, the spring equinox, is celebrated with eggs! We celebrate the return of nourishment through one of these simple signs of spring. By keeping chickens we are learning more about the natural cycles of the Wheel of the Year and how they manifest.

Gardens Transform the World: Review of The Curious Garden

Tonight we read The Curious Garden by Peter Brown. My daughter and I admired the transformation of a dreary city - brown, smoky and people-less - into a green, bustling, and flower-bedecked world. The agents of change? A small boy and a garden. The new green world was not unlike a vision I had while writing Sacred Land, a world where every rooftop, empty lot, playground, park, and yard grew food, flowers, and herbs.

The painter and architect Hundertwasser had similar visions. From Wikipedia: "For Hundertwasser, human misery was a result of the rational, sterile, monotonous architecture, built following the tradition of the Austrian architect Adolf Loos ("Ornament and Crime"). He called for a boycott of this type of architecture, and demanded instead creative freedom of building, and the right to create individual structures. In 1972 he published the manifesto Your window right — your tree duty. Planting trees in an urban environment was to become obligatory: 'If man walks in nature's midst, then he is nature's guest and must learn to behave as a well-brought-up guest.'"

This is a housing development designed by Hundertwasser. It looks a lot like the city at the end of The Curious Garden!

I highly recomend The Curious Garden to any parent of a 3 to 9 year old. After reading it you could draw pictures of a garden city your child might design, plant flowers in a pot, design a new garden for your yard, research wind energy, or just compare and contrast the first illustration with the last.

Review: The Garden Game

A friend of mine picked up a game for me she thought I might enjoy called The Garden Game by Ampersand Press. I love it! My four-year-old and I played it this afternoon, and while the reading-heavy game isn't really meant for the preschool set, we both enjoyed it. I appreciated the educational piece, which teaches about gardens from microbes on up. She like collecting flowers, vegetables, and pollinators for her garden.

Writes the publisher, "The joyful and inspiring board game about gardening for food and fun. Players feed the soil, plant seeds, nurture the plants, have harvest festivals, and help each other through natural disasters! Plant the largest garden and save the most seeds and you are the winner."

This game could easily be adapted to a cooperative game, building a collection of gardens together, focusing on trading garden cards, or making one large garden together. Older children and adults will enjoy learning about the ecology of gardening while younger children can appreciate simpler concepts like pollinators, compost, and the seasons.

Imbolc Earth HomeSchool Gathering

This is the first in a series of blogs about what I am calling Earth School, an informal cooperative of homeschooling families focusing on homesteading, gardening, traditional skills, healing and ecology. Today we met for the first time at my house for Imbolc, also Candlemas in the Christian and Catholic calendars. Imbolc celebrates the return of the light, the very first stirrings of spring. Traditionally candles are made on this day and Yule's dusty greenery is burned in a cleansing fire.

I asked everyone to bring old candles or beeswax, wick if they had some, clean metal cans for melting the wax, and containers or molds. We melted wax in double boilers (aka an aluminum can or a melting bag in a pot of simmering water) and poured them into our containers. We didn't have enough weights, so for some of the candles we tied old crayons to the wicks, one to hold the wick up and one to weight the wick straight.

The kids ranged in ages from infant to five and a half, and they mostly played around the house and in the garden. Everyone enjoyed visiting the chickens - there were two eggs for my daughter to proudly collect. My kitchen is small so we went in shifts, each mama helping her child or children make his or her own candle to take home.

I tried to make a fire outside, but fires need tending, and so do kids. Since I was wearing my baby and keeping toddlers away from the firepit, the fire only lasted a short time. But the smell from the woodsmoke cast an earthy (albeit not very environmental), country smell to our projects. And I did toss in what boughs from our Yule tree I had left (the rest I had used to blanket our herb garden against spring snows).

The kids left tired, happy, and carrying a little symbol of light. They learned how candles are made and that they can do a cool (er, hot) craft with a little help from their parent. And we mamas got to chat, drink tea, chase kids, and have fun.

Happy Imbolc!