The Creative Salad – Page 39 – Crafty fun and homeschool adventures in Sonoma County, California.

A Quick Botany Lesson

Did you know that pollen grains come in different colors?!

I think of pollen as shades of yellow, but that isn’t always the case, as we found out with our Valentine’s Day tulips last month.

The white tulips contained yellow pollen grains:

These pink tulips, however, have PURPLE pollen grains:

How cool is that?! Homeschooling 101 around here.

Curious about other pollen colors? This nifty chart on Wikipedia lists a wide variety of pollen colors, as does the beautiful pollen guide by the Bristol Beekeepers.

So much for thinking that pollen was only yellow! My college botany professor would be so disappointed in me.

DIY Life on Earth Memory Game Magnets

We love the Eeboo Life on Earth Matching Game. When I spotted another copy of the exact same game at the thrift store for $1, I bought it right away. Instead of having two identical memory games, I thought it would be fun to turn this set into attractive magnets for the fridge.

I love the images on the cards, which are paintings by one of our favorite children’s book illustrators, artist Melissa Sweet. A perfect reuse project!

We took each memory game card and stuck two strips of magnet tape to the back of each piece:

Our magnetic strips came from a craft resale shop (that befits our local hospice), but you can either purchase magnetic tape or reuse any magnets that you have in the house (such as those free ones that come in junk mail).

Simple, inexpensive and so attractive — we now own Melissa Sweet magnets!

I love the vivid colors and biological themes gracing our fridge!

I think this project was a hit.

An Ethical Compromise

Here’s an example of how parenthood changes us, though perhaps not in the way you might expect.

Before having kids, my husband and I focused on eating locally. We shopped primarily at the farmers markets and would never buy produce from South America.

Here we are, four years later, with a fruit-loving daughter, and I don’t hesitate when I see organic blueberries grown in Chile for sale at Costco. In fact I’ll go out of my way and drive twenty-five minutes into town to buy more. Ethics, be dammed.

It’s hard enough to get our daughter to eat when we have all these options.

Perhaps a few years down the road, I’ll reclaim my dignity and let our Costco membership lapse. For now, I’m pretending I don’t know myself and hoping in the car… those blueberries taste good. (Of course, they don’t taste as good as those local Sonoma blues but we need to wait until the summer for those…)

My Hard Reality and Their Beautiful Kitchen Gardens

We’ve had an extrememly dry winter here in Northern California. Instead of doning rain boots each morning to combat the daily showers, we put on sandals as we savor sunny and 70 degree days here in Sonoma County. It’s nice, but, well, we really need the rain.

So here we are in February with fruit trees blooming, butterflies coupling, and my hugely overgrown and weedy garden is starting to grow anew.

This can’t be good.

In an attempt to encourage me to get outside and work in our yard, I thought it would be fun to share some particularly beautiful and inspiring kitchen gardens from my Garden Inspiration Board on Pinterest:

Featured above:
1. A Beautiful woven archway welcomes you into this garden featured in The Complete Kitchen Garden: An Inspired Collection of Garden Designs and 100 Seasonal Recipes. (pin/source)
2. A stunning kitchen garden with brick accents. (pin/source)
3. Raised beds, strategically placed shrubs and flowers, and generous paths give this Washington garden its unique style. (pin/source)
4. I love the addition of plants along the gravel path bordering the simple raised beds of this beautiful vegetable garden (pin/source)

View these and many more beautiful gardens on my Garden Inspiration Pinterest board.

(images obtained via Pinterest)

Organizing DVDs

I’ve started gathering the piles of discs, stacks of cases, and boxes full of DVDs from around the house and sorting them into CD binder pages.

Some movies are set aside to donate to the thrift store (that benefits our local hospice); the empty cases will be listed on FreeCycle; and other discs are boxed up to return to friends.

All the discs are being stored in a nondescript, PVC-free 3-ring binder containing one set of CD binder pages:

I find the process of moving the DVDs to be slow going, yet gratifying. (Thankfully I have a little helper! “Many hands make light work.”) I anticipate fewer scratched disks and no more piles of discs scattered throughout the house. And, oh, the space — I have a whole shelf to fill!

And about 100 more DVDs to move over. Where’s my daughter?! I need some help.