Celebrate Earth Hour

http://www.earthhour.org/home/

My family will be participating in Earth Hour tonight, at 8:30 pm our local time. Turn off all of your non-essential electrical appliances, including lights, for one hour tonight. Candlelight is lovely.

Will we make a difference? Probably not tonight. But everything we do, does affect something else. Like a wave of water, we might not see the effect right here, right now, but it is making changes.

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

Spring Break!!!!!!!

We started off our spring break week with a friend's birthday party. Had way too much fun and stayed out way too late :-)
Tuesday we hung out at the Denver Art Museum all day. The kids got to do art - stained glass collages.

It was warm enough to eat lunch outside.

IN the native american area, someone was teaching fiber arts - carding wool, spinning, and weaving.

This exhibit was in the modern art section - very cool.

Gotta love the fake action poses:

Too cool.

A fun magnetic puzzle.

Weird, huh?

This is entitled "Elise going down stairs"

DAM has some pretty amazing architecture.

Wednesday was the all day playdate at my house. The main theme of the day was: Chicks!

All four of the chicks fell asleep in Elise's lap. SO sweet.

Chicks!

Brought the chicks home last night.
The broodery:
Sometimes they sleep like this:

She put her head all the way in!

The line-up. SO far the names are (l to r): Fluff, Pecky, Chipmunk, and Brownie (names subject to change!).

Vernal Equinox

Since today is the vernal equinox, and the first day of spring, I thought today might be a good day to post a garden update.
First of all, I finally finished up that new tomato garden - well, that's what it will be this year. I took out the sod, enclosed with landscaping bricks (there will be at least one more layer on the wall!), turned the soil over to about a foot, added in 2 bags of topsoil/compost blend, and put in about 4 buckets worth of my own compost. I plan to add a few more bags that soil blend, it's pretty nice ($1.50 per bag at KS!). It's a little lopsided, I'm trying to decide if I can live with it or if I need to fix it. IT won't be hard to fix, just take a little time. I think I can live with it for a while. Look at how nice that soil looks, now, if only something will grow in it!


Here is what is already growing in the garden - volunteers or perrenials:
Cilantro:

Garlic chives:

Parsley:

There is also swiss chard coming back (again - I swear - some of these plants are 4 years old!)

Here is my "greens" bed - More chard, spinach, and lettuce. I will replant as needed throughout the season.

I also planted my peas - on St Patrick's Day! A few weeks ago I put some onion seed in the ground - mostly an experiment - but they didn't get watered while we were on our skiing trip - I'm not sure they made it through that (it was warm and dry, of course).

Inside seeds:

Here are my onions from inside - aren't they cute?

Peppers planted last week are just starting to germinate (a few green stems peeking through) and tomatoes are planted this week.

About a month ago (maybe longer?) I planted up some basil and spinach seeds, mainly to see how they would do germinating indoors. They did great:

And here is my kitchen windowsill basil, transplanted from the garden last fall, still going strong (but sadly, not enough for pesto yet!):

Last but not least, a final amarillis bud. This bud is from last years' plant, left in the living room to put on some energy, but I forgot to put the bulb in to storage. Maybe they really don't need that cold period to rebloom?

Happy Spring!!!