Chores

We have begun to implement family chores in our household, now that our two older children are old enough to handle it. What an amazing transformation! This is yet another example of how children respond to and thrive with structure and organization.

We've set it up as a weekly rotating set of "zones" for each of us. Each "zone" is sub-divided into daily responsibilities and once-weekly resposibilities. The kids absolutely love the sense of responsibility and also learning how to do chores that only Mom or Dad used to do. I think it helps them feel a little bit older and bigger. There is an overall happier mood in our home.

Hooray for chores!!!

Well, Blow Me Down !

For the last two nights in a row, overnight thunderstorms have leveled a good portion of the corn stalks in our garden. Thankfully, it also rained so much, that the stalks were neither broken, nor uprotted. This allowed us to upright them and pack the soil around their bases to make them stand straight up again. I guess I need to reinforce the stalks with even more soil than I already had.

Hopefully, the stress of having been blown down, won't reduce the plants' productivity too much. We've really been enjoying the sweet corn for dinner recently

Fusarium Wilt

The anticipation of full, ripe tomatoes from our garden has been lessened somewhat of late, due to a soil fungus called Fusarium Wilt.

Before we knew of this problem, we weren't sure if we were watering the plants too much, or not enough, or if we had accidentally sprayed too much water on the leaves. It turns out that there is nothing we can do about this soil fungus. A few baseball-sized tomatoes are beginning to turn orange/red. We will just have to enjoy the tomatoes we end up getting.Our bell pepper plants and corn plants seem to be coming along much better.

It will be fun to harvest and eat the food from our garden.