Easy Garden Welcome Banner

After having done countless craft projects that involved tissue paper, I had been saving a rather large collection of tissue paper confetti. Since I’m never one to throw stuff away, I saved these bits of colorful goodness to recycle for other projects like this one! Our vegetables are starting to arrive in our garden, and […]

I’m Over at No Time for Flashcards Today!

I’m SO excited!! I’m guest posting over at No Time for Flashcards today! This is one of my all-time favorite blogs, and has such fun learning activities for the little ones, so I was honored when Allie invited me to post there. Check out my post on gardening with kids, and be sure to enter […]

Pretend Play on a Dime — Garden Center

Emily loves to pretend that she works at a garden center. She can spend hours arranging and re-arranging the flowers (as seen here), planting pretend seeds, and caring for her pretend plants. So Mark and I put together a little store front for her about a year ago, and she has been playing with it […]

Loving…

I mentioned a few days ago that we took a trip to a local plant nursery to prepare for our next activity from our Gratitude Jar — Flowers: Make a special flower delivery! Emily and I had so much fun with this! At the plant nursery, we found bags of fall bulbs that were 30% […]

Indoor Herb Garden Update… Sprouts!

When we woke up this morning, we were greeted by these….. …. sprouts of basil from our indoor herb garden!! To celebrate, we read the book Seeds! Seeds! Seeds! by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace. What a fabulous find this book turned out to be, and I highly recommend it if you have any junior gardeners in […]

Indoor Herb Garden

Starting this indoor herb garden was such a fun project for Emily and me, and we are especially looking forward to having some fresh basil to add to our homemade pizzas! Thanks to a few items from Target’s $1 section, this was very inexpensive and surprisingly not nearly as messy as I had anticipated. The […]

Mint-TEA Fresh

If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you probably know about my profound love for tea. (I’ve mentioned it here, here, and oh yes, here…) Today, Emily and I made our own organic mint tea! It was so easy and lots of fun to make! First, we gathered lots and lots of mint from […]

Garden Stones

At this point, our garden could use all the hope, prayers, and well-wishes it can get, so we spent this afternoon making some garden stones using quick dry cement (very inexpensive, and we had some leftover mix in the garage), empty cereal boxes, sea shells, and some glass gems from the dollar store. I had […]

Focus on the Family

This is the memory I am trying to focus on today — an impromptu picnic dinner at the garden. We were enjoying our cold fried chicken, garden salad, cornbread, and slices of watermelon. It was a completely spur-of-the-moment decision, one made out of simply a lack of time to get both dinner and work at […]

And the winner is…

The winner of the Garden Bag Giveaway is Reena!! Congratulations! Here is Reena’s winning comment: What a CUTE bag!!! Right now watering our garden as well as running through the water has become one of our favorite pastimes – tooo hot these past few days! Reena Thanks to everyone for participating, and another fun giveaway […]

Garden Bag Giveaway

We are starting to enjoy our garden, and lately there have been lots of pickings. I was bringing reusable shopping totes to collect our veggies, but after getting my hands on some burlap I was inspired to create a “Garden Goodies” bag. I hand-stamped the lettering and made a very basic drawstring bag. Today the […]

Garden Update

This summer our family signed up for a garden plot through our township. It was a bargain. Six hundred square feet for just $10 for the year! Plus, it was already tilled for us. They might as well have just planted the seeds for us, and given us a garden. It sounded ridiculously easy. We […]

Free Printable Garden Journal Pages

We have been hard at work on our garden journal. I love working on this with Emily because it is very frugal, it helps connect us with nature, and it keeps her interest for long periods of time. We were successful at tricking the forsythia into blooming a bit early by bringing some branches indoors, […]

Starting a Garden Journal

We have been noticing some signs of Spring around here, and I thought it would be fun to start keeping a garden journal with Emily. Our been sprouts are starting to turn green… This morning she planted some tomato seeds in an empty egg carton. Kids love to plant seeds, don’t they? We brought some forsythia branches […]

Sunflowers and Bean Sprouts

The emphasis on art projects has always been on the process in our household, but Emily was very proud of the outcome of this project and it has encouraged her to do more stamping projects similar to this one. To make your own sunflower stamping project you will need: a brown paper bag, some paint, […]

The Money Garden

Who says money doesn’t grow on trees? This $10 seed investment boasts that it can yield over $650 worth of vegetables on just one tenth of an acre! For more gardening tips, see my recent post Garden Planning.

Garden Planning

Even if you have never planned a garden before, now may be a terrific time to start. Our family just signed up for a garden plot through the local community center, and I think Emily will benefit from watching and caring for all our vegetables, herbs, and flowers.  If you do not have the space […]