“A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.” {joining Soule Mama today} If you’re inspired to follow along, please leave a link to your moment in the comments!
To welcome fall, we joined with another family for a walk in the woods at a local natural area. We were greeted by an abundance of tiny characters beneath the trees; little acorns wearing their adorable caps. Many were gathered in baskets and pails, before we hit the trail.
Along the way we saw fall leaves, plants with questionable berries, ducks, and squirrels. Leaves were gathered and brought back home for crafts. Read on for the Beeswax Dipped Leaves tutorial – for an activity that is pleasing to the senses, with the comforting aroma of beeswax, the beautiful colours of leaves, and the surprisingly soft texture of the end product.
Forgive the lack of process photos, as it was a bit tricky to get shots with 7 kiddos working with hot wax in a tiny corner of our kitchen… that said, this is truly a simple project.
For more leaf learning, don’t miss our Fall Leaves Inspiration Pack, which is oozing with over 40 pages of fun, engaging activities for learning about and with fall leaves. You’ll find Montessori inspired learning, Waldorf inspired learning, story book recommendations, recipes, poems, and more.
Materials:
Instructions
1. To start, set up a line of twine or string and have a basket of clothes pins ready. Lay out an old towel under the leaf line, to catch the drips of beeswax.
2. Chop or grate some beeswax and put it in a double boiler on medium heat until melted. We used about 1/2 cup of shavings and dipped roughly 30 leaves with a bit of wax leftover.
3. Remove the pot from the heat, and over to where your towel is set up. Grasp a leaf stem between the chopsticks, and lower it into the pot, moving as necessary until covered. Keep your leaf pile to the left of your pot, to encourage left to right transferring (the same direction as we read!).
4. Using a clothespin, hang the leaf from the stem on the line to dry.
5. Repeat.
6. Once all of the leaves are dry, create your piece of art. Below are some ideas, or you can come up with your own creations:
Try making some patterns in your creations, such as a colour or leaf type pattern for the garland.
This post is shared as a part of Simply Natural Saturdays at the Pistachio Project, Thank Goodness It’s Monday at Nourishing Joy, Montessori Monday at Living Montessori Now, Hip Homeschool Hop Good Tips Tuesday, and Our Days.
As part of our homeschool curriculum this fall, we are volunteering at a local stable. This morning marked our first visit and we are so thankful for the opportunity to learn the value of hard yet rewarding work! Hauling, feeding, mucking, leading, grooming… all in a day’s work. The kids were truly tuckered after completing their chores, but in a good way. A good way that means heading home for warm showers, cozy towels, fresh clothes, a nourishing meal, and settling in to some grounding work like finger-knitting.
The kids are also seeing first hand that there truly is no such thing as a free horse, even if kijiji leads you to believe otherwise. The costs and labour are large, they are learning – yet so are the rewards.
So, what can a 6 year old and 10 year old learn from one morning at a stable? If they have a great facilitator, a lot. Aside from general safety rules, some of the things they recall include:
The kids both agree that this is their favourite class so far, and they are eagerly awaiting next week’s visit with our new friends.
This post has been shared as a part of Simple Lives Thursday at My Humble Home.
“A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.” {joining Soule Mama today} If you’re inspired to follow along, please leave a link to your moment in the comments!
Recently we were blessed to be able to harvest from two apple trees at the home of a relative’s neighbour. The neighbour is ill and in the hospital, so the apples are just slowly falling to waste. Armed with baskets, and snacks, we went for a harvest day and picked what we could reach, being careful to pick only what we could reach with our arms extended or by climbing a limb, so that the smaller among us would have plenty to pick as well.
The first thing requested was apple french toast, followed by apple muffins, and finally applesauce. Thanks to Aimée at Simple Bites, we decided to not only add cinnamon to our sauce, but also vanilla – whole vanilla bean. This made for a decadent and beautiful applesauce and I’m not sure we can ever go back to sauce without vanilla again.
Below are the steps we take to make our sauce:
Wash the apples in water and a splash of vinegar.
We keep prep really simple and just cut off any bad spots, before tossing them in the pot. Add 1 cup of water for 6 lbs of apples, adjusting for how thick or thin you like your sauce. Toss in cinnamon and one vanilla bean, scored open to release the vanilla flecks.
Cook down the apples on medium-low heat until they are soft enough to mill.
Place the mill over a bowl or pot, scoop the apples in, and mill, getting out as much sauce as you can.
Using a funnel, scoop the milled sauce into clean canning jars. We don’t actually can our sauce; in preference of keeping things simple, we freeze it and take out a jar the night before we want it.
Beautiful applesauce with vanilla bean flecks. We hope that the apple tree owner will enjoy a gratefully gifted jar or two of this sauce soon!
This post was featured at Thank Goodness It’s Monday at Nourishing Joy and shared as a part of Unprocessed Fridays at Girl Meets Nourishment.
Growing, cooking, and eating good food is a huge part of our family’s life. Another passion of ours is reading – we read when we wake up, we read throughout the day, and we read each night before bed. Our children often find some books, pull up their chairs and ask if it’s ‘Tea and Story Time’ yet, one of our favourite combinations of our two shared passions of food and written word.
Helping our children understand the importance and honour of eating local, organic food from farmers we often know and love is something we as parents take seriously. Creating an environment rich with books about food, farmers, gardening and other food related topics helps us accomplish this goal. Open the PDF book list to check out some of our family favourites.
Not all the books are about healthy, local food, but they can serve to spark a discussion about these things and deepen the connection to the natural world. Have you read any of them? If so, share your thoughts in the comments – and add your family favourites as well!
This post has been shared at Thank Goodness It’s Monday at Nourishing Joy.
Passing on the skills of growing and preparing food to our children is such a privilege and joy – not to mention an important step in the path to their future self-sufficiency. In these summer months the kids love being a part of caring for the garden, from preparing the garden and planting the seeds, to harvesting the fresh, intensely flavoured fruits and vegetables.
How can we keep our little ones interested in learning about food? The answer is pretty simple. Make it fun.
We’re all familiar with lemonade stands and this idea adds a twist – invite your children to harvest some garden produce and create their own mini farmer’s market (just don’t call it “mini” in front of them – this is their very own business venture!). If you’re rurally based, just head over to a friend or relative’s place – or work with your children to organize a market at your local community centre or town hall with their friends.
MATERIALS:
The rest is really self explanatory, yet remember: your job is to facilitate and try to bite your tongue when they want to sell a single shell pea for a dollar. This is a learning experience for them, not only to nourish those roots of a love for growing food, but in marketing, sorting and counting money, assigning value to items, teamwork if you have more than one child, and so much more. At the same time, we all know that sitting around and not making sales is no fun – if business isn’t going well after a while, offer up a gentle suggestion that lowered prices or even a “buy one, get a dozen free” special on shell peas might help.
Have fun with your market – please do share a link to your photos in the comments!
This post has been shared at Thank Goodness It’s Monday at Nourishing Joy and featured as most popular post.
Today as I was harvesting swiss chard from the garden, the idea to pickle the stalks struck me. Thanks to the wisdom of my dear friend, Adrienne, I remembered that you can really ferment just about anything. I cut off the stalks and set aside the leaves to freeze for smoothies, omelettes and casseroles, and set to work experimenting with my first jar of fermented chard stalks.
1. Wash and cut the stalks so they will fit into your clean 500ml (2 cup) canning jar.
2. Toss some garlic, dill, and a bay leaf into the jar. You can play around with seasonings and add really any flavours that you and your family enjoy.
3. Stuff the chard stalks into the jar. Pack them in. One of Adrienne’s tricks is to reserve some pieces to lay across the top to keep the other pieces from floating up and out of the brine (I ran out of stalks, or this jar would be way more packed than it is).
4. I made a whey-free version, simply because I didn’t have whey on hand. To do this, mix 2 tbsp sea salt with 1/2C water. Pour over the stalks. Add water to cover, leaving one inch of air space at the top of the jar.
5. Screw the lid on tightly and set aside for 3-7 days. I like to put a tray with a lip underneath to collect any potential leaks.
6. After 3-7 days, place into cold storage. Whey free ferments are saltier, so Adrienne recommends leaving them in cold storage for as long as four to six weeks to develop tasty flavours and diminish the saltiness.
To learn more about fermentation (and how to make whey based vegetable ferments, among many other things), check out Adrienne’s latest course, Traditional Wisdom Modern Kitchen. It’s a game changer.
This post is a part of Natural Living Monday Natural Link Up at Modern Alternative Health, Thank Goodness It’s Monday at Nourishing Joy, Fight Back Fridays at Food Renegade and Unprocessed Fridays at Girl Meets Nourishement.
Hardneck garlic varieties are hardy and bestow a special treat – they produce flower stalks called scapes that are lovely in many recipes.
We make pesto with scapes that are harvested from our garden – this is the time (early to mid July for our plants) to harvest scapes. Harvesting them rather than leaving them allows the plants to put energy into developing nice healthy bulbs.
Kids will love to help harvest garlic scapes because of their curly shape. They can be worn as bracelets while harvesting and carrying inside to cook!
Toss those curly scapes into the blender along with the parmesan, nuts, and half of the oil. Blend thoroughly. Now drizzle in the remaining oil while blending until you reach your desired texture.
Enjoy your pesto fresh or freeze it for a few months and use when desired.
What is your favourite way to use garlic scapes? Tell us in the comments.
“A Friday ritual. A single photo – no words – capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember.”
{joining Soule Mama today}
If you’re inspired to follow along, please leave a link to your moment in the comments!
