Our first bit of gardening excitement this week was noticing two tiny apples on one of our apple trees. We just planted them last year, and we knew not to expect apples the first year because the trees were too young. This year, however, we're hoping for at least enough apples to make a pie! Mmmm!
Another bit of excitement: We had given up on our coneflower seeds because they hadn't sprouted, and I got to thinking that maybe I shouldn't have tried planting three-year-old seeds. {grin} Besides the challenge of sprouting old seeds, our pot got rather drowned in a rain storm last week so I thought all the seeds probably got splashed out. Yesterday, however, we saw that we DO indeed have at least one seed sprouting!!! HURRAY!
We spent some time in out flower garden this week, and I finally did some much-needed 
weeding while Kathryn admired her asters blooming. Those are her birth-flower, and we planted two plants last year and thought they had both died due to the drought and watering ban last year. Kathryn also planted four more new asters this year, but they are still tiny and we're not sure if they'll bloom this year, but they seem to be doing well, so she's very pleased. We were delighted that one of last year's asters did survive, and that is the one currently blooming. 
Many of our other flowers are beginning to bloom beautifully, too; my hydrangea is blooming better than it ever has, and the roses are certainly making my home earn it's name of "Rose Cottage" right now!
At lunch, we read about asters in The Handbook of Nature Study and she also found them in one of her Usborne books. Afterwards, we brought one of the asters inside to draw, and we worked alongside each other while drawing in our own nature notebooks. I'm trying to do more in my own to encourage Kathryn to draw in hers without pushing her to do so. Actually, I enjoy it, but tend to get "too busy" to do it myself unless I sit down and draw with her. Just another way that homeschooling makes me a better person and a better mom. When we were done drawing, Kathryn pulled the aster apart, as suggested in our book, to see all the little parts with her magnifying glass. This is yet another composite flower, but it seemed easier to indentify parts of the disc flowers in the center of this one than the others we've studied. We learned that the aster was named because of its shape: "aster" means "star". We also learned that the outer ray flowers will form akenes like our dandelions from last week's study, and they will float away on the wind to form more asters. I found it amusing that in previous weeks, we've been studying flowers classified as weeds instead of our garden flowers, and when we actually chose a flower from our garden this week, it turned out to be listed in the "wildflowers" section of The Handbook of Nature Study! So we still haven't managed to pick a flower that Anna Botsford Comstock classifies as an actual garden flower!!!
We're having so much fun learning about our flowers! Thanks for joining us in our nature study this week!
Another bit of excitement: We had given up on our coneflower seeds because they hadn't sprouted, and I got to thinking that maybe I shouldn't have tried planting three-year-old seeds. {grin} Besides the challenge of sprouting old seeds, our pot got rather drowned in a rain storm last week so I thought all the seeds probably got splashed out. Yesterday, however, we saw that we DO indeed have at least one seed sprouting!!! HURRAY!
We spent some time in out flower garden this week, and I finally did some much-needed weeding while Kathryn admired her asters blooming. Those are her birth-flower, and we planted two plants last year and thought they had both died due to the drought and watering ban last year. Kathryn also planted four more new asters this year, but they are still tiny and we're not sure if they'll bloom this year, but they seem to be doing well, so she's very pleased. We were delighted that one of last year's asters did survive, and that is the one currently blooming. Many of our other flowers are beginning to bloom beautifully, too; my hydrangea is blooming better than it ever has, and the roses are certainly making my home earn it's name of "Rose Cottage" right now!At lunch, we read about asters in The Handbook of Nature Study and she also found them in one of her Usborne books. Afterwards, we brought one of the asters inside to draw, and we worked alongside each other while drawing in our own nature notebooks. I'm trying to do more in my own to encourage Kathryn to draw in hers without pushing her to do so. Actually, I enjoy it, but tend to get "too busy" to do it myself unless I sit down and draw with her. Just another way that homeschooling makes me a better person and a better mom. When we were done drawing, Kathryn pulled the aster apart, as suggested in our book, to see all the little parts with her magnifying glass. This is yet another composite flower, but it seemed easier to indentify parts of the disc flowers in the center of this one than the others we've studied. We learned that the aster was named because of its shape: "aster" means "star". We also learned that the outer ray flowers will form akenes like our dandelions from last week's study, and they will float away on the wind to form more asters. I found it amusing that in previous weeks, we've been studying flowers classified as weeds instead of our garden flowers, and when we actually chose a flower from our garden this week, it turned out to be listed in the "wildflowers" section of The Handbook of Nature Study! So we still haven't managed to pick a flower that Anna Botsford Comstock classifies as an actual garden flower!!!
We're having so much fun learning about our flowers! Thanks for joining us in our nature study this week!
