Planning the Garden

I have been busy trying to plan my garden for this summer. There is nothing like a little spring weather for some inspiration!

I really have to order my seeds this weekend so that I can be sure I have them in time to start my indoor plants. I haven't had much success with seed starting yet, but I keep trying.

I thought I would share a few gardening sites that I like:

Vegetable Gardening Online
Econobusters shared this link in a recent newsletter. This website is full of information for beginning gardeners, including free garden plans using the square foot gardening method, garden planning worksheets to download, plant profiles, various types of gardens, and a free online garden planner. The online garden planner allows you to choose a garden size and drag vegetables and fruits to various squares. It even shows you how many vegetables to plant per square! You can design a garden using tips throughout the website, name it, and print it out.

Little House in the Suburbs
You will find the feed to this blog in my sidebar because it is one of my favorites. They have quite a few gardening tips along with a lot of free gardening printables (scroll down and look through old posts for the garden printables or just scroll through the garden category), including several square foot garden plans with instructions. The most recent printable is a free Spring Planner (instructions here).

Organic Gardening
I don't subscribe to the magazine, but I do receive Organic Gardening's e-newsletter. Their website many helpful articles.

I also have an old gardening post that has some other helpful gardening links.

Black History Month Resources

This is an edited repost from 2008.

February is Black History Month in the United States. This is a great time for educators to focus in on an aspect of our history that does not always receive thorough treatment in textbooks. I have posted many helpful links for in-depth study of African-American history, as well as an inexpensive homeschool resource that our family really enjoys.

I haven't completely gone through all of these sites, so please use discretion and do some previewing!

These two sites contain many links for studying African American history:

• Black History Month at FactMonster
• Black History Month at Education World

Awesome Stories is a favorite resource in our homeschool. "Enjoy an interactive learning experience as you see thousands of hand-selected and relevant links to pictures, artifacts, manuscripts, documents and other primary sources, IN CONTEXT, within each story." This is a huge site with tons and tons of information. If you haven't seen it, it is well worth looking at. I signed up for the free academic membership a few years ago, which gives you access to narrated stories, lesson plans, text documents, etc. Here are some of the Awesome Stories links related to Black History Month:

• Amazing Grace: The Story Behind the Movie
• Slave Voices
• Black History Month (A-I) and Black History Month (J-Z) (some of these will link to chapters in the above topic - they are "focused topic" lists)
• Slavery and the Slave Trade (A-F) and Slavery and the Slave Trade (G-Z) (focused topic lists)
• Civil Rights (a focused topic list)
• American Civil War (A-I) and American Civil War (J-Z) (focused topic lists)

For Older Students:

• PBS: Africans in America: This is a very informative PBS website. I was amazed at the amount of information here! There is also a PBS video series by this name that I was able to obtain from my local library. It is also available at Netflix.
• PBS: African American World: Your guide to African American history and culture
• Black History at History.com
• The Underground Railroad (interactive National Geographic site)
• The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African: If you saw the movie "Amazing Grace," this is the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, one of the people featured in the movie.

For Younger Students:

• Educational Bookmarks for Black History Month
• Culture and Change: Black History in America (Scholastic site)

About Africa:

• PBS: Wonders of the African World
• PBS: Africa for Kids
• PBS: Kids Africa
• Xpeditions Printable Map of Africa (I had to include at least one map! You can customize this one for printing.)

Although this post highlights free resources for Black History Month, I would be remiss if I didn't mention fellow homeschooler Belinda Bullard's Christ-centered, literature-based history curriculum, written from an African American perspective. Her products and samples are available at A Blessed Heritage Educational Resources.

We supplemented our Tapestry of Grace Year 2 and Year 3 curriculum with This Far by Faith, Volume 1. We are currently using This Far by Faith, Volume 2 as our main history curriculum, supplemented by Tapestry of Grace Year 3 and Year 4 selections and some extra work for our high school students. I highly recommend this inexpensive resource if you are interested in adding an African American focus to your history studies.

Belinda has also written a unit study called A Historical Walk through the Harlem Renaissance that we will be purchasing once we get to the 1920s. I am really excited about it!

Enjoy!

Experiments in Soap Making

It seems that I am always experimenting with something or other. I am always trying to learn how to make things, be it food, cleaning products, hygiene products, or more obscure (weird?) items. Last summer, I decided to try my hand at soap making. I made plain, unscented soap for bathing and some lard-based soap (scented) to use in my homemade laundry soap. I was pretty pleased with those batches. The bars don't look great, but they work! :-)

Since then, I have wanted to try to make my own dish soap and shampoo. We used the unscented bath soap bar to wash our hair for a few days when we ran out of shampoo. That actually worked really well. I had to use apple cider vinegar as a kind of conditioner for my hair with this method. I put it in a spray bottle, sprayed it on my hair in the shower, and rinsed it out.

Since we are used to liquid shampoos with scents, I tried to convert my laundry soap bars into liquid for that purpose without much success. The unscented bath bars suds up more, and we really do like the suds for our hair even if they aren't necessary.  I also tried the liquid for dishes, but I didn't really like it.

I finally ordered potassium hydroxide to make liquid soap, my latest experiment. I am quite a ways into my first batch as I type. Liquid soap is definitely more time-consuming than bar soap! I'll let you know how it turns out when I'm finished.

In the meantime, I thought I would share some soap-making links in case anyone is interested. These are all cold process soap links (cold process soap has to cure for several weeks to neutralize the lye before it is ready for use). I will add liquid soap making links to my liquid soap post.

• Homestead Crafts at The Family Homestead (scroll down for the soap making info): I was first inspired to try making soap by reading about it at The Family Homestead. I used Crystal's Simple Soap Recipe for the bath soap and Crystal's Lard Soap for Laundry (same page, last recipe). I added about 1 ounce of lavender essential oil to the laundry soap.
• down to earth has a really helpful soap tutorial with pictures.
• Miller's Homemade Soap Pages is *the* place to go for cold-pressed soap making information! I used Kathy Miller's Soap Classic recipe for my latest batch of cold-pressed soap with orange blossom and lavender essential oils  (the kids begged me for a scented bath soap). That will be curing for a few weeks, so we haven't used it yet. It smells great, though.
• Grandpappy's Homemade Soap Recipe: This is how they made soap in the "old days." The recipe includes instructions for making your own lye and rendering your own animal fat.

Menu Plan Monday - October 19

I'm only posting dinners this week. If you would like to see our breakfasts, lunches and cooking notes, you can look on my menu plan calendar.

Monday

Ground Beef & Cabbage over brown rice, steamed green beans

Tuesday

Potato Sausage Chowder, salad

Wednesday

Chicken Enchiladas, some kind of veggie

Thursday

Salmon Patties, baked fries, steamed broccoli (didn't make last week because I didn't have salmon!)

Friday

spaghetti with meat sauce, salad

Saturday

Chicken Pot Pie, probably an additional veggie on the side

Sunday

Beef Stroganoff, salad

To see many more menu plans, go to this week's Menu Plan Monday at I'm An Organizing Junkie!