Weekly Wrap Up: Mostly Gardening

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In my life this week …  We finished planting the garden!  The final task was replanting the peppers that never came up…and since it’s so warm, we even put in some eggplant.  I hope they will produce.  We may still need to replant some of the kale and Brussels sprouts, though.

Our Manchurian apricot trees, which have baby apricots for the first time, have brown rot.  There’s no choice but to spray, so we found a semi-OK fungicide, and bought a sprayer.  That’s discouraging, but there doesn’t seem to be anything else to do for this fungus…besides different pruning, and it’s too late for that this year.

 
In our {summer} homeschool this week … We’ve rediscovered Calculadder, the math drill program.  The Little Misses love it and asked me if we could take it along on our holidays!  We spend about 10-15 minutes on it each time we do it, and I’m hoping that by the end of the summer Miss 8 will no longer use her fingers to add.  

Places we’re going and people we’re seeing …  This has been a mostly at-home week, with lots of reading, gardening, swimming, writing, planning, and resting.  And we had friends over for a crazy cooking, play-in-the-rain kind of day.  

 
My favorite things this week were …

• Fresh strawberries from the garden.
• Sunshine and rain.
• Watching four kids (11, 10, 8, 8 ) negotiating all the different aspects of communal gluten-free crepe-making peacefully and successfully.
• Picking greens for my husband’s breakfast and arranging them beautifully for him.
• Our first honey!  Sweet, sticky, and full of all sorts of health benefits.
• A huge pond, complete with islands, coves, boats, and springs in our sand pile.
• Swimming.
• Not doing formal school-work.

What’s working for us … Gardening!  I love the peaceful work; we all love the food; our bodies love the nutrition.

Questions/thoughts I have …  We have a huge garden, a small fruit orchard, quite a few nut trees, bees, chickens, and ducks.  It would, perhaps, be possible to turn this into an official small farm, with all the work and tax-benefits involved with that.  We hope to make a decision about this in the next 12 months.  It would definitely have to be one of those crafty, value-added operations, since we don’t have enough land to make a real hobby farm.  Do we have the time, energy, interest, skill, and strength?  Will that sort of lifestyle support our other commitments or detract from them?  

  
A photo, video, link, or quote to share …  Here’s excellent post about  fighting fair .   The modern Mrs. Darcy  is one of the few blogs that I’ve subscribed to.

This post is linked to The Homeschool Mother’s Journal  and to Weekly Wrap Up at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.