First really good garden carrots

At the beginning of September I told the boys we needed to get out there and work in our little garden.  We had carrots that we had been leaving and leaving, making sure they got big enough.  The greens on carrot tops get crazy big, even when the carrots are very small.  Max really wanted to pluck them, so we did, and here is what we got.  They ended up being pretty tasty too.

Gardening with friends

Our gardening adventure has been interesting, educational, and fun.  A few weeks ago we let our lettuce plants go to seed.  This is Jackson harvesting seed.   Kind of hard to see in this picture, but I wanted him to remember he helped!

We had neighbor friends stop over to learn what we were doing.

When a tomato would drop off the plant or the birds did not eat all the seeds, little tomato plants would just pop up all over the garden.  Pretty funny, but it made no need for us to start more from seed.

We thought after the first round of peppers we got that our plants might be finished.  But...  a little time of waiting and they started flowering again.  Even more than last time, it seems.

Green peppers!!

Mike and I decided we would try some regular green bell peppers in our garden.  So, I took the seeds from a store bought pepper, dried them out, and planted them.  Three plans grew.  And they grew fast!

I just harvested the big one you see in the picture and it was delicious!  Crunchy and fresh!!  

Field trip to Kahuku Farm

Oh the beauty of homeschool!!  We had some homeschool friends set up a field trip to a local farm.  My plan is to do many more field trips next year.  I need to start the planning for that right now!

We road on a little trolley that took us around the farm to look at all the different areas where they grow things.

This farm grows many different fruits.  Unfortunately, I cannot remember what this picture is of:(  I feel like maybe it is kale?

Sugarcane!!

Apple bananas.  We learned that bananas will grow a flower on the end of their bunch.  When you want the bunch to stop producing and just mature, you cut off the flower.  

Some birds of paradise.  There are some glimpses of the Azores here.  Too bad that does not include the awesome friends we made there!!

The apple-banana tree grove

Papaya trees.  We learned that "vine ripened" really only means that the fruit has the tiniest bit of the ripe color on it.  If they don't pick the fruit at that time, the birds will eat them up.  We have experienced that with our tomatoes here in our little home garden.  The instant they have an orange streak, the birds are eating them.  

We were able to have a lettuce growing class for the kiddos.  Very cool.  The guy teaching the class totally sounded just like my friend Kat Klein.  I went through the whole class with this sense of familiarity, like I already knew this guy.  Lol, I asked if he was from the East coast somewhere and told him he sounded like a friend of mine.  He told me I was right; he was from the Boston area.  From Boston all the way to Hawaii to work on this farm!

They grow lettuce just to use in the little restaurant they have there at the farm.  They use these really cool water tables.  That is basically a big styrofoam board with holes in it that the lettuce roots go down through and sit in the water.  

Here, he pulled one of the lettuces out so the kids could see the roots.

Of course, what would a field trip be without being able to bring home a souvenier?  The kids got their hands dirty and planted their own lettuce seeds in some little cups.  The teacher showed them how to make sure the soil had the perfect amount of moisture in it.  Lettuce seeds are really tiny.

You can see Jackson there in his new favorite shirt with the Superman cape "painted on" the back of the t-shirt.  He picks that shirt out of the laundry pretty much any time it is clean.

At the farm we also learned about this cool way to compost using worms and sterilite bins.  So, of course I asked if they could give us some worms to take home (the guy mentioned they would do so during the class).  Did you know worms cost $100 a pound?  Craziness!  

Anyhow, I put Mike to work the next day, drilling holes all over our bins.  We have started with two bins, which he stacked together and drilled holes all over.  Then, you fill the bottom one with a about a two inch layer of ripped up newspaper or other paper products and then a minimal amount of fruit or veggie shavings or skins.  You only do that a couple times a week, which is supposed to be enough for the worms and will also keep the bin from smelling.  You should keep it in a shady area.  

Now we are just waiting to see how it all works out!  

Garden fun!

Red leaf lettuce from our garden!

Arugula 

Better picture of the lettuce

Dark brown frog, can you see him?  They bury themselves down in the dirt like that.  The dark colored ones are the only ones we find in the garden during the day, but during the night there are usually a whole bunch.

First carrot.  We pulled it way too early, but I was just so curious about it, lol

Gardening for homeschool science: Beans, peppers, and peas

Green beans on January 4th

Green beans on January 15th

Pepper plants on January 15th

Gardening science: Tomatoes

I forgot to mention that for the purpose of school, we made a nature journal.  We first started with putting pictures or journal entries of random things we experienced in nature in there.  We will still do that if it suits our fancy.  But we also added a chart for the garden.  We had started this on a posterboard, but it was just too big and we could not find a place that made sense to hang it up.  Plus, we kept adding too many things to this whole garden plot experience.  I made many of the initial entries, copied from the posterboard, but now, Jackson is making entries as well, which are basically simple observations about what is growing or changing with the plants in our garden box.

Tomatoes, January 4th, 2014.  We bought these ones from the garden store and planted them on December 26th.  A Whopper plant and a Better Bush plant.  

Tomatoes.  We had to cage them, yay!!  January 15th.  You can't see it very well, but the plant on the left actually has a green tomato on it.  

This is a tomato that we started from seed on December 15th.  We transplanted into this container on December 26th.  This picture was from January 4th.

On December 26th we replanted the egg carton with all tomatoes.  As of January 4th, we had 4 sprouts.

As of January 7th, we had 9 sprouts and one of the sprouts would end up having 4 plants in it.  Oops!  Max must have been helping with the planting, lol. 

Gardening science: red leaf lettuce, swiss chard, arugula

January 4th, 2014.  I cut both the red leaf lettuce and the arugula down and had my first salad the day after this picture.  

January 7th.  This is how much the red leaf lettuce has already grown back since January 5th!!  Cool right?

The arugula is not as fast growing back as the red leaf lettuce.

January 15th.  Ready for another salad!

I cut the swiss chard so we could try it grilled on January 10th and it's small leaves have already grown big and new ones have started to grow again.

Gardening for homeschool science: Yellow squash and green zucchini

You might have seen my post about our gardening science ongoing project.  Mike built me a garden box and then we started experimenting with seeds.  We also went to the garden store and got some plants that were already started.  I am really just blogging about this now for my own records, lol.  I want to see the plants as they grow and I can just keep coming back and adding more pictures in.

Yellow squash plants, as of January 4th, 2013.  They were planted from seed on December 15th.

You can see the other plants here too, but these are the yellow squash on January 7th, 2013.  The plant that looks similar and is a little to the left of the squashes is a green zucchini plant.  

January 15th.  They got huge!!

This one is the zucchini.  The yellow squashes are moving into all the other plants' territory.  Not sure what we should do!!