our seedlings are coming along...

her teacup garden

chamomile, calendula and sage

borage, lupine and allysum

silver mist (helichysum)

silver mist (close up)

her hawaiian tomato plant

rocks as canvas

i like rocks. i like to collect them from various places i go and i've been doing this since i was a kid. i even look out for them on my neighborhood walks. i use to decorate rocks by painting and drawing on them with nail polish as a teenager. now, i am beginning to illustrate on them again. here are a few i did with prisma markers. the rocks i have used are rocks found from my walks or around my house.

a wild bird bunting

a sunflower

a red riding hood in the forest

we made a wormery...

while digging up dirt in the front yard area to get it ready for a moon garden, i found a big fat worm! i was pretty excited because it just reminded me of my childhood, getting dirty and playing with bugs. i decided to keep it and look for more. once it was time for nat to come home from school, i was so thrilled to show her (imagine, over worms)! it was then decided that we make a wormery...and so we did...

you have to make several layers of moistened newspaper, sand and soil. we were all out of sand but we continued on anyhow...

if you look closely, you'll see a teensy tiny worm in my hand...

since nat's room is naturally dark (it has no windows, i know, sad, huh?) it's the perfect place for her wormery. they have some carrot ends and tea compost to munch on. we will keep them for two weeks and then let them go.

tanaka and armstrong

today the girl and i played hooky from our regular day things (including school) and went to tanaka farms with some friends. it was our first time there and we both really enjoyed ourselves. today was a free tour so they walked us to the strawberry fields and let us have our pick! we got the reddest strawberries straight off the vine and they were unbelievably delicious! between the strawberries where sweet maui onions that help keep pests away with their aroma..











on the way back from the strawberry fields to the tents we passed hundreds of sunflowers of several varieties. we also got to see some bees at work!













once inside the tents, the kids got ready to draw strawberries and use red and green paints scented with strawberry shampoo. once all the painting was done, everyone had their lunches and then it was off to the produce market!











once we were all done, we went to look at a few sunflowers again and headed off to armstrong garden center by our house.













we bought a few seeds, a hawaiian tomato plant and a silver mist (because one of her favorite never fairies, tinkerbell's friends, is named silvermist)!

a day at dana point

rick's uncle and his family were camping out at dana point for the holiday weekend. we stopped by for the day and the kids had a blast by the ocean!

the rocks and feathers we collected...

and some of them, i used for decoration...