Wednesday, February 27, 2008

:an apologia of sorts, and garden bounty:

Does it seem a little like my blog is turning into a gardening/outdoorsy blog? It’s that time of year. Also, Magnus and I are ‘between kindys’ at the moment - our experiment with Playcentre last year ultimately failed and is over, we have been doing ‘home kindergarten’ since Playcentre ended and are currently doing some visits at our local Steiner kindy - to see if that might meet our needs better. Finding somewhere for Magnus to be happy and settled and appreciated for being himself has been much harder than I anticipated.

All this has meant that I’ve been doing a lot of hands-on parenting, and very little ‘me stuff’ (writing, making etc) but one thing that IS very compatible with pre-schoolers, is gardening. M can noodle around the backyard - sandpit, bike, throwing stones into containers of water - while I weed and mulch and prune and pick.

And the picking is so good lately - each day a large colander piled with food. I take care to tell the boys which bits of our dinner has come from our garden, in an attempt to give them a sense of gratitude for food, and also a feeling of connection with the food.

They love to plant seeds, water plants and pick vegetables...and sometimes they even eat them, too. Sometimes. 

Those are lovely veggies though. I was just commenting on another blog about how badly I wish I could have a garden. I miss working in the dirt with my hands. I have a while though until all this snow business is over with.

I love the garden posts - me being nascent gardener. And your photos are always so bright and cheery. They really punctuate the fact that home grown food is the best treat.

xx

I’m enjoying your outdoorsy posts and writings since you’ve been back. The purple beans look great. My 14 year old isn’t interested in his garden education anymore but he was right into it as a pre-schooler. Now we’re doing supermarket education, budgeting, buying healthy food, why to buy food grown in NZ rather than cheaper food imported from other countries, hopefully it will help him appreciate my values. I’m sad Playcentre didn’t work out for you, though I know every centre is structured a little differently and being a parent co-operative it will depend alot on the parents involved. Hope Steiner works out better.

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