Green Hour #9: One Small Square

Barb, at The Heart of Harmony, gave us this green hour challenge last week: measure a one or two foot square outside. Mark it with yarn and rocks. See how many different things you can find in that square. Study them with your magnifying lens. Save some for your collection. Write about it in your journal.

My kids are always digging in the dirt and bringing me the treasure they find. So, this was fun for them to do. I tried to encourage them to look a little harder. We marveled at the worms, found many different weeds (our backyard is a weed magnet) and tried to identify them, several seeds, fire bugs (Box Elder Beetles--Anna's favorite), red and black ants, rolly-pollys (Claire's favorite), rocks (Sam remembered the difference between sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic rocks), and those little shells (we still haven't figured out what they are).

The thing that stood out the most to us with this challenge was how many different living things could exist in a small space. Not only exist together, but rely on eachother. It is such a careful balance. Elise summed things up when she said, "Mom! At first you just see a little piece of ground. When you look closer, it's like a whole city!"

"A child who makes a garden, and thus becomes intimate with the plants he cultivates, and comes to understand the interrelation of the various forms of life which he finds in his garden, has progressed far in the fundamental knowledge of nature's way as well as in a practical knowledge of agriculture."
(Gardening and Nature Study, Handbook of Nature Study, pg 20)

We started planting our garden this week. So, in addition to our little observation square, we each had to prepare a section of the garden for our own plants and seeds. Elise is tending the tomatoes and cantelope. Sam has watermelon and beans. Claire has sunflowers. I have green peppers which are in very sad shape because shortly after I put the plants in, it dropped to 20 degrees in the night. :( I'm trying to revive them. We'll see. I also have some herbs; cilantro and rosemary.

Everyone wanted to take care of the strawberries. Anna Comstock, in her Handbook of Nature Study, says, "Of all the blossoms that clothe our open fields, one of the prettiest is that of the wild strawberry. And yet so influenced is man by his stomach that he seldom heeds this flower except as a promise of a crop of strawberries." (The Strawberry, pg 608-609) We enjoyed the lesson on strawberries this week.




We've also been enjoying our bike rides. This week we wanted to bike all the way to Utah Lake. We almost got there. Really we were very close.



Here are a few friends we saw:

Our own butterflies are still chrysalids. We are anxious for the butterflies to come. We wonder how in the world all that change is happening inside those tiny chrysalids. I will post more about them later.