Saturday's Walk

This weekend I chose to take my walk through our woods on Saturday instead of Sunday and it's a good thing!  Sunday it wound up raining all day long so I would have had to put on a rain coat and left the camera at home.  I don't think the wild life suspected that I would be out.  I saw six Jakes and six or seven deer along with one squirrel and lots of birds.  Here are a few of my favorite pictures from my stroll.

 

I have names for different parts of our property.  This is Fernbank.





 

 

The top part of this wild orchid spent the winter inside my house the year before last.

 

 

Surprisingly this bank was not near as slick as the creek. 

 

I had a surprise friend to join me!

 

This is our waterfall.  With all the rain yesterday I imagine she was really flowing!

Planning a Garden with Kids

I consider myself lucky that I have two gardens to plan.  We have a rather large garden at home and a smaller one at the day care.  I have showed you plans for our garden at home, so here's what we are doing at the DC.

Several months ago, I purchased chalk board contact paper from Amazon.com.  For some reason I didn't think I would like it and didn't do anything with it right away.  I was lucky to have it when this project came to mind.  I found a spot of wall space in the kitchen, measured it and cut out the appropriate size of the contact paper.  I then stuck it right on the wall.  It is utterly fantastic!  It takes chalk writing really well and once more when I am finished I can peel it off and no harm done to my wall! 

So, after the back drop for our plans was in place, the kids and I got out the Burpee seed catalogue.  This is the one I get in the mail, mostly because it is where I have wound up ordering garlic seed for the last two years.  I have been asking the kids what they wanted to grow in our garden this year for weeks.  So it wasn't to tough to look through and find pictures to cut out.  We taped them on to the contact paper and I wrote what each of them were next to the picture. 

Next, all we have to do is the layout of our garden and then on to actual planting! 

 

 

 

 

Now this puts me in the market for kid sized tools for the garden!

My Favorite Magazine

Let me tell you about my favorite magazine.  I don't have a subscription to it.  Mainly because it costs so much because it comes from another country.  But if I am lucky, when I visit Hendersonville or Rivergate book stores, I can find the current month's copy waiting for me on the magazine rack. 

It is Country Living, British Edition.  I first saw it on a flickr friend's photo that lives... somewhere else.  It has wonderful articles and home decorating pictures.  I am half intrigued to see how the other side of the world decorates and cooks but also I love the farm animal write ups and recipes.  Although the recipe measurements have to be converted to what I know and it totally throws me off if I try one. 

They also have a good resale value on ebay if I could ever let go of a copy. 

January 2013 copy.

This is how you know for sure that it's the one. 

This month has a good article about keeping chickens.  I love the idea of hanging greens for them like this.

I pour over the details of pictures like this.

This bed spread makes me want to learn to crochet.

This is my favorite edition from June of 2010. 

And this is why.  I was amazed at this article about the kingfisher that lives in their country.  We have them here but definitely not their beautiful colors.

Gone Fishing

Sometimes there's nothing better than a make-shift fishing pole.  I got it in me this morning to come up with some sort of fishing poles for the kids to play with today.  It's way too muddy to actually fish in the ponds.  So after I found up a coat hanger rod and wooden dowel for poles, yarn for fishing line and a jingle bell for bait, we headed outside to fish off the back porch.

After we caught all those fish we found a puddle at the end of the house.  When we caught all those fish and it was time to come inside, we got two indoor ponds (boxes) and made cut out fish with magnets on them.  You really have to have a steady hand when fishing for the indoor fish.  The magnets stick to the metal ball inside the jingle bell so it's a little tougher to do. 

These kids have had a blast and didn't want to put their poles away for nap time