Catching up on September

Monarch Magic at Amazon.com
Sometimes weeks go by and I wonder what on Earth I've been doing with my time. I find that writing is a great way to review what is going on in my life and to realize that I really have actually achieved something. With that in mind, her's an update on items I've blogged about in the last month or so:

Monarch, Mini and Tiny, our monarch caterpillars, successfully transformed into beautiful butterflies. We had the amazing pleasure of watching them fly off to a new life. I'll never tire of raising monarchs!

Four weeks after planting, my fall vegetables have given us our first green salad. I wasn't sure what to expect with this gardening adventure. Germination was faster than I expected, then the weather cooled and everything seemed to grow very little. The weather warmed back up and now the greens are at least six inches tall. I picked a salad while thinning them out a couple of days back. That was 4 weeks from planting to yield the first food - not bad!

My green improvements have not gone anywhere to date - they exist only in my head.

The spikey trees are still standing, but Handyman Hubby has studied and so have I. He has a plan and is ready to go as soon as he has some time to get out there. Everything we've read and everyone we've spoken to says that herbicide is the way to go when removing trees for prairie restoration. I don't like to spray, but I reluctantly agree that in this situation that carefully targeted herbicide is the best approach. OK, send me the hate mail now for using herbicide if you must! Humans have created this problem of trees invading the grassland and we need to be responsible and clear it up.

I'm on my own so far as I know with the Green Laundry Challenge (no readers told me they joined in yet). I've successfully cut my use of the tumble drier down to practically zero. Initially I planned to just air dry when I felt like it, but soon I began to do this for more and more laundry. To date I've air dried 18 loads of laundry - some of them were very full loads too. I've even started making crunchy towels; I discovered that if I really want softer towels 10 minutes of no-heat tumbling in the drier will soften them up reasonably. This is nice because that uses a LOT less electricity.

I'm happy with our homeschool choices for this year. It's the first year I've been able to say that. I'm particularly happy with Rosetta Stone. It's totally awesome to hear Japanese and German coming from the other side of the room; it feels like my kids have been replaced with strange counterparts! I'm proud of how we are doing with homeschooling this year. It does look like we need to make a change on how we're doing social studies; the one subject we have been doing as a family seems to need a change, which I suppose is not terribly surprising given that we have a 3 year age gap and two kids who take dramatically different approaches to learning.There are many things I'd like to have done this last month, but I think I've done the things that are most important to me and to my family and that feels good :-)

1 Monarch Becomes 3 plus!

One of our all-time favorite homeschool experiences has been the raising of monarch caterpillars to butterflies. We are "blessed" with milkweed vines - they consistently try to take over every vertical surface in our garden! When we first moved here handyman hubby confused them with virginia creeper (it's a story for another time) so I attempted to wage war and remove every milkweed vine I saw. I soon discovered a monarch caterpillar munching and was stopped in my tracks.

I'm getting to the 1 monarch turns into 3 here in a minute, honestly! The milkweed vines and I have a pleasant truce. Every year I remove enough to prevent them becoming a monoculture, but I leave enough so that monarchs will have a home. They're not as pretty as as the orange butterfly plants most people think of in association with monarchs, but they're here, and they're free, and I love monarchs!

Well, 10 days ago I was out maintaining the truce, pulling up most of the mikweed vines, when I hit the jackpot - one very large, stripey, monarch caterpillar! Of course I had to rush in to tell the kids and grab our butterfly habitat (a large, plastic jar that used to house pretzels). If you've ever tried raising bugs in a jar and discovered the mess you get with bug poop, there's an easy secret on fixing this. Just put a small layer of dirt from the garden in the bottom of the jar -- nature will take care of the mess for you. I can't believe it took me half a lifetime to discover this! By the way, don't use the lid that came with your jar, a tissue held on with a rubber band allows much better airflow.

Back to our 1 monarch. He settled himself right into our vine and dirt habitat and by the next morning had turned into a beautiful, bright green, jewel-studded coccoon. While we were a little disappointed to have missed watching him grow, it was very exciting to know he was on his way to emerging as a buttefly. Imagine our surprise when we then noticed a tiny monarch caterpillar, and his buddy, a miniscule caterpillar who had entered the habitat with the food source vine!

For the last 10 days we've watched Tiny and Miniscule grow up at an astounding rate. As I write, Tiny is busy spinning silk and preparing his cocoon attachment. I know that Miniscule will soon follow in Tiny's footsteps, assuring us a front seat at the future emergence of not 1 monarch birth, but 3! Who knows, there may even be other little monarch guys and gals hidden in the vines I brought in this morning, but if not we are waiting patiently to discover the adult identity of two more avid milkweed consumer larvae, which we suspect will grow into beetles.

Life surely contains surprises -- these are one of the good ones :-)