Summer is Coming!

All of my spring traveling is now behind me and Emily and I are working diligently to finish up the school year. She just has one week left and a choir concert to participate in, and then we can focus on our summer activities which includes gardening and the farmers' market.

Emily has spent the past few months making bottle cap magnets to sell. We ordered 100 count packs of caps, packs of tiny magnets, glossy accent filler, and glue for the magnets. I also hopped over to Jo-Ann Fabrics to buy a one inch hole punch. We punch out small round pictures from almost anything: old cards, magazines, catalogues. Pretty  much anything that has super tiny pictures. Emily then pastes them into the caps with a minuscule amount of accent filler. When they are dry she applies a liberal amount of filler on top to seal the picture. And last but not least, she glues a small magnet on the back. They are just the cutest magnets ever and I'm sure they will sell well. She also has a few Perler Bead magnets to sell as well.

I just went to the store to stock up on supplies for the baking I do for farmers' market. Soon the smell of home-made granola, brownies, scotchies, and mini quick breads will permeate our  home. This year I am also going to add the candied pecans I took to  my author friends to my repertoire.

Bobby will soon be planting our Sun Sugar orange cherry tomatoes, sweet yellow onions, and some peppers. Hopefully the black raspberries I planted last fall will produce their first crop this year as well. All of this talk about farmers' market, garden plants, and planting makes me think about books on the same subjects, so here are a few of my favorites:

Holly Bloom's Garden

Apples To Oregon

Our Community Garden

Mortimer's First Garden

And although I have yet to read Jack's Garden, it looks like a book I definitely want to check out!

Well, that about wraps it up for this week. Join me next week for another exciting episode, same crazy time, same crazy channel. Also be sure to drop by and join the Literacy Musings Monday Blog Hop where you will find other great blogs, or my personal website, Fun With Aileen, where you will find more on reading, writing, and my very own early grade Fern Valley chapter book series and my Quack and Daisy picture book series. And finally, you can find me on twitter @AileenWStewart if you want an extremely brief glimpse into my days. 

It's Garden Time!

It's that time of year again where excitement over our yearly garden gently wraps each of us with a blanket of anticipation. My husband tills up the clean, fresh dirt in our raised beds, I search for the right plants, and Emily helps plant, weed, and water. 

Just this past weekend, I purchased two beefsteak tomato plants.  Now I just need to find the Sun Sugar cherry tomatoes we plant, decide if we want onions and lettuce, and make my rounds at the Amish garden stands to find flowers for my flower beds.

As is my custom, I made a trip to the library to gather a large stack of books for reading and reviewing and decided a couple of them should be about gardens. The first book I read was The Vegetables Go To Bed by Christopher King. It's an older book, but if you can't find it at your local library, there are used copies available at Amazon.

Told in rhyme, The Vegetables Go To Bed, tells the tale of vegetables in the garden who are mostly reluctant to go to sleep for the night. The illustrations are what make this book truly spectacular. The first letter on each page is a special letter with a small picture of some kind and the vegetables have gentle faces and hands giving them the appearance of being alive. Very subtly, the story of the vegetables getting ready for bed and growing while they sleep, parallels to the way children are reluctant for bed and grow while they sleep. I think this would be a great book for children five to eight.

The next book I read was Cecil's Garden by Holly Keller. This is also an older book, but well worth hunting down. Of the two, this book was  my favorite. Cecil, his brother, and his sister set out to plant a garden but it is only big enough to hold five rows of vegetables. Unfortunately, they have six packets of seeds. Since they can't decide which seeds to eliminate they end up going into the house without planting anything. Cecil decides to go for a walk and finds both his mouse friends and his mole friends arguing amongst themselves as well. Cecil decides he just doesn't like arguing and he is going home to plant his garden. The creative solution he comes up with is very exciting and well worth finding out about.

Well, that about wraps it up for this week. Join me next week for another exciting episode, same crazy time, same crazy channel. And feel free to drop by my personal website, Fun With Aileen, any day of the week for even more on reading, writing, my very own early grade chapter book, Fern Valley, and my soon to be released sequel, Return To Fern Valley, coming summer of 2014! I'm also on twitter @AileenWStewart if you want an extremely brief glimpse into my days.