I know, this is disgusting. Our boys are in charge of taking the compost or kitchen scraps out and one day during the winter this is how we found it. We need to add more brown to our compost pile. Sad state of affairs. That’s why I am considering recruiting some worms to do the work or at least help. Just call me a worm farmer now. 
Not really.
As you all know, we are all for going green and living a healthy lifestyle while making use of the earth’s resources in a responsible and sustainable way. We desire to be good stewards. You are also familiar with our farm journey. That’s why when we were introduced to The Gigglin’ Garden Gang we were excited because it was right up our alley!
In recent years our family has enjoyed planning, preparing and planting our garden. This “Go Green and Giggle”® Book & Tote Garden Activity Gift Set fits perfectly with our fun family activities, but first I had to buy it.
Shopping Online for the “Go Green and Giggle”® Book & Tote Garden Activity Gift Set
First I went to GigglinGardenGang.com. They have some fun music playing that my little guys zoomed over to the computer to “see” being so use to music videos we watch. The website is very easy to navigate and very pleasing to the eye.
To order the product I had to click on their Amazon link to the left side of their home page:
Once I clicked the link it took me to The Gigglin’ Garden Gang’s Amazon shop:
From there is really was a piece of cake, click add to cart:
Amazon will then confirm that the item is in your cart:
After that just click to place order:
Completing the order was a matter of imputing credit card info or editing personal information. I really did not have to do much because we do have an Amazon account so most of my information was already stored. It really is that simple and took less than 5 minutes to do! I love shopping online, can you tell? 
Green Children-Friendly Activities
If you are looking for sustainable activities to do with your children on Earth Day, which is only a month away, the “Go Green and Giggle”® Book & Tote Garden Activity Gift Set is the perfect one to choose! Our children loved it! Of course, I only bought one so they all had to share. It contains the “Go Green and Giggle”® Book, the tote, the greenhouse with six soil wafers, sunflower seeds, a sticker, a coloring sheet of Sunflower Suzi and a CD featuring Sunflower Suzi singing cute little songs – a Theme song and a Go Green and Giggle Rap & Instrumental – my children loved listening to it! We played it a few times while doing our planting activity and they just asked again as I was typing.
The kit unpackaged.
My four year old holding the greenhouse.
Individual components of the kit. The sunflower seeds were tucked safely on the back page of the book by Sunflower Suzi after all she is providing them to us, right?
The soil wafers up close.
The sunflower seeds.
We added warm water to the soil wafers. The children took turns and actually did very well pouring the water! Very little mess, surprisingly! lol!
Each of the children planted a seeds. We actually had 7 sunflower seeds in our package. Our oldest did not participate. She was on her laptop!
As you can see from the greenhouse tray there are actually 12 cells in which to plant. The directions recommended taking it off, but we kept it on and decided to plant the extra sunflower seed as well as some snap peas. My daughter experimented last year with seed saving and these are actually seeds she saved from our snap peas. We hope to do more seed saving this year! All a part of stewardship and being sustainable.
Baby even helped!
Ta-da! All done with the planting!
We really had fun. I read the book to the children, then they sat and read it. Very cute illustrations and funny little jokes that made us giggle! We hope to get permission to use those in our farm newsletter in the future!
What a great rainy day activity too! I was glad to be able to keep my children busy this morning since they couldn’t go outside!
Connect with The Gigglin’ Garden Gang Online
To connect with the Gigglin’ Garden Gang on their social media sites, please visit:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/GoGreenNGiggle (@GoGreenNGiggle)
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/sunflowersuzi
This shop has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for
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I had a friend of mine sent me an email about preventing mold on berries. Not sure if it works, fresh berries don’t stay in our house very long. They are usually gone before any molding sets in. Here’s the tip:
Prepare a mixture of one part white or apple cider vinegar and ten parts water. Put the berries in the mixture swirl them around. Drain, rinse (if desired) and pop in the fridge. The vinegar kills any mold spores and other bacteria that might be on the fruit.
I can see how the vinegar would kill the mold, it works great as household cleaner.
Has anyone done this and does it work?
There is always something to do around our home, whether it’s housework, work or whatever. For this week’s motivation I want us to work on organizing our days better to get more done across the board, especially once we have the garden and chickens. It’ll be easier once summer comes, I think, but for now we need more organized days as not everything is getting done that needs to be done lately. It doesn’t help that all the children have been sick the past week, but still when we get behind on things it is time to pull up our boot straps and get back at it. I may blog less this week as we catch up, just depends.
Seeds and Veggie Plants
On Friday afternoon I was able to get onions, kale, parsley, leeks, spinach, cabbage and Swiss chard planted. You should see the children’s seeds! They are no longer seeds, but little plants! It’s amazing how they sprouted and grew in the last week!
And here are the seeds I planted on Friday, March 16. Again, as you can see I used what I had to save money, instead of buying seed flats I used the big foil roasters and lasagna pans. Hey it works as I got 40-45 seeds planted in each! I did buy 4″ pots to replant everything into and we’ll reuse the egg cartons and pans to plant more seeds for succession planting.
Fun!
I’m in farming mode this week as the weather has been in the 70’s and we have tons of stuff to do if we are going to get anything accomplished! I ordered baby chicks online yesterday and was even able to schedule their delivery date. Yes! The chicken breeds we wanted were not available for several weeks.
Different Chicken Breeds
Here are the breeds we ordered:
25 Buff Orpingtons, a gentle brown egg layer. This is the flock my little ones and I will manage.
6 Black Australorps, a docile breed that is heat and cold tolerant and lay brown eggs as well. This is the breed that my two daughters chose for their little flock.
8 Arcuanas, another docile breed but they lay green/blue eggs! This breed will be cared for by my two older boys.
We ordered them from Murray McMurray Hatchery. We’ll be sure to take photos of the chicks when the arrive in about 6 or 7 weeks.
Do-It-Yourself Chicken Coop Ideas
We ordered baby chicks and now we need a place to keep them! The whole idea behind our farming is to not only grow our own food but to allow our children to experience different things and learn new skills. That is why my husband plans to build our own chicken coops with our boys and why I am chief researcher in getting ideas. We are doing this ourselves to save money and to teach our boys how to do it.
PVC Chicken Coops
We are interested in a moveable chicken house, which allows the chickens to scratch in new areas and not be confined to one place. We would like to try to make a chicken coop that is light-weight, which is why we are considering making one out of PVC pipe. We’d need to get PVC Fittings, like Schedule 80 PVC fittings for the corners and such. PVC also seems like it might be more economical than wood, and wouldn’t rot.
The one disadvantage I thought of in regards to the PVC is we get a lot of high winds and what if the whole coop just up and blew away…..whooosh! There goes our profits and meat supply!
A-Frame Chicken Coop
My daughter wants an A-frame chicken tractor/coop like the one at this website. However, I am partial to different moveable coop, but a modified version for laying hens.
This should be a fun project once I finish researching, deciding and figuring out the costs of each one. And yes, I intend to take lots of pictures and videos as we build our coop.
How about you, do you have any DIY projects on the go? If so, what are they?
This is great for you and your kids. I can see two plus’ to this already!
A) You need to be outside to use this reference guide
B) You and your kids are learning and it’s fun! Kinda like a treasure hunt!
Go an get your Wildflower Reference Guide at http://shop.wildseedfarms.com/inforequest.asp
Our oldest son has challenged us more in homeschooling than any of our girls ever did and in order to get him to read we had to come up with certain incentives that were of interest to him and made him want to read for the end result. For him it was getting a BB gun. Even the promise of a $50 bill did not motivate him! He had to read a certain amount from January until his birthday in February then he could have his BB gun. He made the goal and on his birthday or the day after my husband took him to Farm & Fleet to buy a BB gun. However, he could not shoot his BB gun until he finished a certain amount of books….let’s just say he kicked his reading up a notch because this past Sunday he (and the rest of the family too) got to shoot his BB gun. The joys of living in the country affords us new experiences we would never had if we still lived in our townhouse subdivision and I have to say our children are happier for the change!
The Target – Nothing fancy mind you, but it worked for us!
The Master Teacher – An awesome Dad! (a must-have!)
The Students - Eager boys (and girls in our family’s case)
Teaching Safety - Especially to our younger crew (and NO we did NOT shoot at the target with them behind it! That’s why we were teaching THEM about safety as cute as they were trying to hid behind the box!)
Ready, Aim, Fire! – The REAL fun!
That about says it all! My husband was the only one to hit the target. Our two sons and one of our daughters hit the box when my husband decided that might be an easier target to start with. The rest of us missed!
Daylight Savings has begun, the days are growing longer and warmer. Signs of spring. Ahhh….the change of seasons is so refreshingly sweet, isn’t it?
It was so nice yesterday and we our box of seeds (Mike the Gardener’s and Johnny’s Seeds) came the other day that my girls were begging me to start planting. I did not have our seed flats or other containers, but we did have plenty of egg cartons that we were saving for when we had our laying hens, so I told the girls to go ahead and use the egg cartons to start the seeds. They went to town and got a lot planted. Then again when you have 5-6 pairs of hands it does not take long to get a job done. They planted veggie seeds and flower seeds.
My motivation this week is to get the rest of our seeds planted that need to be planted so they are ready to put into the ground at the right time. What the children planted yesterday was for their individual gardens, not our big one! We have one table set up in our living room and will probably need to set our other one up once I get my seeds planted. I am hoping it is warm enough and light enough in front of our big window. (Dreaming of the day we have a greenhouse or hoop house!)
We also have to get the tiller serviced so it is ready to go when we start planting outside. I have asked my dear husband to do that job!
Chickens will be ordered but we will plan for them to arrive in April and May. Pretty exciting stuff going on here at Loony Acres!
For once my Monday Motivation is not about cleaning or working, but about showing hospitality and sharing our experience making maple syrup. This week on one of the homeschool yahoo groups someone posted about a maple syrup event that was a great children’s activity especially for homeschoolers, however, it was with a cost. I know how much homeschoolers watch their budgets, after all I am one! So without too much thought I posted inviting interested families to our house for a FREE homeschool activity to see what we have done to make our own maple syrup this year. After I hit send, I was like, “Oh-oh, what have I done?” I wasn’t expecting much response and about four families responded. Therefore, we’ll be getting ready for our guests this week, as I thought hot chocolate and homemade cookies were in order to go along with the children learning about where maple syrup comes from and how it is made.
The catch is we got snow and it is colder so the sap may not be running this week, but we’ll wait and see. Someone said it was going to hit the 50’s by mid-week, which will be perfect and muddy. It should be fun to meet new people and share what the Lord has blessed us with here with our maple trees and space.
This week’s motivation is to share our home and maple syrup adventure with other homeschooling families. Hopefully blessing them by helping them save money on an outing and to show them if we can do it so can they!
The Rest of Our Maple Syrup Story
Obviously we are not done tapping our trees or collecting sap, nevertheless, I thought it was time to show the rest of our maple syrup adventure or what we have recorded so far. We’ve had a few mishaps and bumps in the road and may not get as much sap as we had hoped. 
You see, we have had wind blow our bags off, we have had them fall off due to being too heavy and we have had certain family members dump our maple syrup down the drain thinking it was water in the pot! Yeah, that’s what I said. This happened two different times by two different people and I am like, “Can’t you ask first? We are making syrup!?” Talk about aggravating, to say the least. Both individuals were apologetic and felt bad, but accidents happen…..still, just ask!
Our Tapping Adventure Continues
Drilling.
The younger ones wanted to try too.
The tap is in. We were not very happy about the sap dripping out below the tap, but that was rectified once we got the drill boring the right way!
The bags were put on the little metal hangers and set on the taps.
The day we put them up the sap was running fast. This is what we got within the first couple of hours.
Then by late afternoon, look what we had!
We improvised when we ran out of metal hangers and use a milk jug and wire.
This pot was full of sap and you have to boil it down to almost nothing.
Then we filtered the sap to get dirt and any other unwanted particles out of the syrup.
Baby wanted in on the action too.
Not a lot of syrup and by the time we had bottle it (sorry no picture of that!) we only got a quart out of 3-4 bags of sap. It wasn’t as thick as we would have liked, so it should have been boiled more. We know that for the next batch we do, as we are living and learning as we go along.
Melissa over at The Mommyhood Chronicles is having a Saturday’s Top Five Laughs Blog Hop that seems like too much fun to pass up. I am going to share five things that made me laugh this week. Most of them are what my oldest dear daughter has shared with me or what I have come across online through my scrolling.
1. Moms and Dinnertime. Any moms relate? With four growing boys in the house our cupboards and refrigerator should have revolving doors and automatic restocking! Any inventors out there? Came across the above comic on Facebook.
2. Maple Syrup Funny. When we first started drilling the holes in the trees it was taking forever and I couldn’t figure out why. Yes, the drill bit did not seem to be in correctly, but no saw dust was even coming out of the hole. Finally I discovered a little switch on the handle that went side to side. I wondered what it would do if I moved it to the far right? We tried to drill the hole and presto! The hole was drilled lickety-split! We had been drilling backwards! What do my daughters and I know about drills? Only that they drill holes.
3. Organic Farming.
4. Entrepreneurs.
5. Motherhood.
My daughter is always finding these memes to share and laugh over. I should be grateful but when my brain is foggy from lack of sleep and my eyes are cross-eyed from staring at a computer screen for too long, sometimes it takes me longer to “get” the message! I got these just fine.
