Category Archives: garden

May 4 2012

Grow Your Own Sprouts

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Tasty, crunchy sprouts are a delicious addition to salad, and stir fry.  Here is an easy way to grow your own sprouts using glass jars.  You’ll need a glass jar, a mason canning style jar works nicely for this, a piece of cheesecloth,  some sprout seeds, and water.

Place a few spoonfuls of the seeds at the bottom of the jar.  Fill the jar with water about a quart of the way full.  Cover the opening of the jar with cheese cloth and then put on the ring lid to the jar. Let the seeds soak overnight.  In the morning, drain the seeds and rinse them thoroughly two times.  Make sure to drain them well to prevent mold. Shake the seeds around in the jar so they evenly disperse as you lay it on it’s side.

Repeat the rinsing process about every 8 hours. The sprouts should be ready to eat in a few days wen they have grown long enough to eat.  When you see the tail sprout out of the seed they are ready.  To clean off the hulls soak the sprouts in a bowl of water and swirl them around with your hand.  Push the sprouts down and the hulls should float to the top to easily be ladled off. Drain the sprouts and enjoy!

Apr 20 2012

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle at Home with Kids

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Earth Day is around the corner.  I’m teaching my daughter about the importance of reducing, reusing and recycling.  I want her to understand that it is our responsibility to take care of the Earth.  I plan to do a few projects with her based on each of those principles to explain and reinforce this concept.

So far I’ve come up with starting a compost pile in the backyard, for the garden, to help recycle and reduce some of the waste we would normally throw away.  I was also thinking it would be fun to have her sort the trash with me into the appropriate bins when we do recycling.  I’m trying to think of some fun ideas for reusing items that she would get excited about.  I can’t seem to think of any off the top of my head.  I’d love any suggestions any of you migth have that  I could do with my daughter.

Apr 18 2012

Mini Flower Pots for Lady Bug

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After the big mess with Lady Bug and her attempting to plant a garden in her bedroom on her carpet, I decided that I wanted to help her accomplish her goal of having flowers in her room in a much neater way.  This afternoon I stopped off at Target and found some of the cutest little flower pots in the dollar section.  I got a few pots with sunflowers and also a few daisies.  They are only about 1.5″ to 2″ and I think they will look cute on her windowsill.

Whether or not these flowers will grow is really beyond me.  I’m just hoping that it satisfies her desire for growing things in her room without making a huge mess. I also got a cute pink shelf liner that I plan to place underneath all of the little pots on the windowsill so soil doesn’t get everywhere.  I’m sure she is going to love them, especially since I also grabbed a pack of pony stickers for her to use to decorate all of the pots.

Apr 16 2012

A Garden on the Carpet

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Sometimes I wish my daughter didn’t have carpet in her room.  She’s usually very clean and careful with things in her room.  However, she does have the occasional accident and messes are made. This afternoon I found a big giant mess when I walked into her bedroom.

Apparently she decided that she wanted to have a garden in her room.  She had a bucket full of dirt that she had collected from the backyard and she had picked a variety of flowers from the garden.  She was in the middle of planting her garden in the carpet when I found her. She did a very nice job of grinding the dirt into the carpet as she piled it into mounds to plant the flowers. It was cute but cleaning this mess up was not something I was looking forward to.  I didn’t panic though because I remembered some tips that my sister had given me when she looked up carpet cleaning round rock tx when her four year old son decided to make mud pies in the house one day.

I scooped up the big debris the best I could and then vacuumed. She really ground the dirt in so I now have a big brown spot on the carpet where she planted her garden.  I feel like being lazy though after a long week I’ve had so, I’m going to call the carpet cleaning guys in the morning.  Hopefully, the stain will come out.

Apr 7 2012

Painting the Grass Green

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Today was the community Easter Egg Hunt. I took Lady Bug to gather eggs with the other children in the neighborhood. She had tons of fun running around in the grass at the park. I snapped a bunch of pictures of her looking for the hidden eggs.

The grass looked soo vibrant in all of the pictures. It reminded me of a time I went to visit family in Tennessee and saw a man spraying green onto the grass in front of a business.  I thought it was pretty strange at first. Then I saw another person spraying the same green substance onto his front lawn. I appreciate a nice looking lawn, but I’ve never considered faking it with spray paint.