Carrie Spritzer – Page 40 – The Creative Salad

Earthy Collage Project

A simple project, with ingredients straight from the pantry, for some toddler arts and crafts exploration.

You will need:
-cardboard, poster board or sturdy paper
-seeds, legumes or nuts (we used dried chickpeas, black beans, split peas and pumpkin seeds)
-craft glue
-popsicle sticks, optional (for moving around the glue and incorporating into the collage, if interested)

Spread the glue around on your paper, then drop beans, seeds, or nuts on the page however you like.

Encourage your toddler to stir, mix-up and sort the supplies! Evidently that was the best part.

Let the collage dry. Then hang it up or put it away to give later as a present.

Fall Crops

As I talked about yesterday, we’ve endured a very cold summer and therefore had little to no harvest. Instead of ripping out our summer garden to start planting fall crops, we decided to expand our vegetable garden area to give our tomatoes, zucchini and strawberries more time to grow and ripen.

Who needs a front yard anyway?! (Above, our yard back in July.)

This weekend we planted purple potatoes, swiss chard and lettuce.

Miss Leyba was thrilled about the “topedoes” and less than thrilled about “the salad ” (i.e. anything leafy and green). She did help me place every single seedling in the ground though and has been very eager to check on the plants. (“Are the topedoes ready yet?” Sigh.)

It feels very much like a Victory Garden to me.

What Summer Harvest?!

We’ve had a very cool summer here in Northern California. For the most part, it’s been in the 60s and (occasionally) 70s during the day, with the temperatures dropping down to the 50s at night. This is highly unusual. David absolutely hates it.

While it means we’ve rarely been overheated the last few months, we have had to bundle up every morning cause I refuse to turn on the heat (hello, it’s August!) and our garden is lush green, green, green…

with lots of stems, leaves, and flowers, but no harvest to speak of!

We’ve had 6 cherry tomatoes, all of which Miss Leyba has eaten, and ZERO of the other two types of tomatoes we planted. (They’re there, they’re maybe growing, but they’re not ripening.)

One strawberry consumed by, you guessed it, Miss Leyba.

One zucchini with more on the way.

And lots of cilantro (though it’s going to seed as I type this).

Usually we’d start planting our fall crop now, but instead we have no choice but to wait it out and hope for warmer weather to increase our crop. I tell you, our plants are teasing us right now!