The other day I offered my son a choice…. finish your schooling (doing bookwork) OR help me with some gardening. He actually stopped to think about it! 🙂 In the end he said “Mom it’s really nice out here, are you sure it’s okay if I help you instead?”
Hands On Learning while being helpful … it’s a win-win in my book.
In the fall we thought we were going to move, so friends of ours asked about getting part of our red currant bush. I told them sure, take a piece off. Saw it this spring and realized they had dug the bush up but …. hadn’t covered the roots and what not so figured I’d move it. It wasn’t hard getting it out…but I couldn’t move it on my own. The lad to the rescue! “I’ll help mom, just where do I grab it?” He took one side and I then other and we got her planted in a new spot. One that gives us access all around. Anyways, this granted us the ability to examine the root system of a currant bush. They are not very deep for the size of the bush and spread out all over. The root system was probably about as big around as the bush, but only 1/4 the depth of the height. We were quite surprised at this.
What else did we do?
Well, I raise rabbits, and in the summer they get greens out of my garden. A big part of those greens is my large patch of chervil and parsley. We moved it from the messy, full of weeds patch to a new section of garden, effectively increasing the patch size from a half garden to almost a full garden. We only moved about half the patch today, the rest I worked on over the course of a week.
We moved the black currant bush and discovered we had two of them. We moved the bigger one where we wanted it, with compost on the roots, then made a temporary home for the smaller one. Decided we would sell that one if we could. He made me laugh. I managed to sell it for $10 and my son’s immediate response was “I want to grow more mom! Then I can sell them next year!” WOOT WOOT! I’m raising a fine entrepreneur. I taught him how easy it was to start new currant bushes so now the red and black currant bushes have some brick holding down branches waiting to start new plants. Black currant roots are fewer in number and more spindly. Very easy to dig up and move.
Our next task was the bee garden. We call it that because we have a bumble bee who lives somewhere in the middle of the wood pile. We are fairly sure she lives under the big piece of wood in the middle. We don’t like to bother her and it’s been fun having her bumble around us this spring on the warm days. She never bothers us. Anyways, we pulled out all the dead leftover stuff and tided up the bed, replanted what should grow again. We have a wee bit to do yet, but then we got hungry as we forgot lunch.
Lunch is an excellent thing to have after a hard days work you know? Lunch was followed by in rhetoric by Silverdale Press. It made for an excellent day all round.
The lad’s joys
- discovery of a very large black beetle. Led him on a search for the name (unsuccessful but it was a cool bug)
- Ants! We have two new ant hills in our yard. One I want gone and the other I don’t worry on. The lad wants them all to stay but in the path of a lawn mower is not the best place for an ant nest.
- Some of our tadpoles have legs! We have some growing that are very large and take a long time to develop. Going on two years now for some of them. We’re kinda anxious to learn what kind they are.
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