Curiosity has been a big theme of our 2nd year with Build It Up. Whether it has been experimenting with new crops, handling pest problems (what IS that bug?!) or how to stay on top of harvesting/preserving, we’re constantly asking, “what can we do?” Well, it turns out we can do more than we imagined.
We planted garlic, onions, shallots, cabbage and celery for the first time this year. Apart from the celery, they’ve all done amazingly! We grew more broccoli after testing it last year. About half of those broccoli never produced heads. At first, I felt like this was a failure. But we figured out that our pickiest eater is a HUGE fan of broccoli greens. Instead of pulling the plants, we canned 30 quarts of broccoli greens before the heat and bugs became too much. Now we are curious how many greens we need to grow in order to feed our family for a year.
Thanks to the new kids’ cooking class offered this year, the boys have been super interested in helping cut up veggies. It was a big game for them to cut out all of the stems on the greens. They have been so much more motivated to help with prepping food from the garden. We’re looking forward to that help when our tomatoes need processing!
The curiosity has extended with pest control–our oldest now prides himself on being able to identify ALL the stages of the bad bugs. He LOVED studying Adam’ Watson’s slides during a class. He’ll tell you all about the well known “garden bag guys,” but he was curious about a new caterpillar that was munching on our dill. We now have two swallowtail chrysalis that we are patiently waiting to see emerge. The dill was saved, and he has a fun science story to tell.
~Lee Carden
