Every year for Mother’s Day we visit our local nursery and I get to pick out flowers for the garden.

By doing this…

we get more bang for our buck — sixteen plants for the price of one bouquet,

we support local, organic farmers, plus our independently owned garden center,

I receive a gift that I enjoy year after year as each plant continues to grow, spread, and bloom in our garden,

we share this gift with the creatures living in our yard and our neighbors in our community,

and we enjoy a family activity that I look forward to each year.

I believe that we must honor, care for, and respect the earth every day of the year.

We must encourage our children in their development of a sense of responsibility for our planet.

To build that, we garden, hike, explore, learn about and come to treasure the world around us.

Every day is Earth Day. Let’s try to get outside today to enjoy and celebrate our beautiful world!

We’ve been gardening! And by gardening I mean we’ve been weeding, weeding and weeding some more… yes, I know, we’ll be weeding ALL SUMMER LONG. It’s one of those perpetual cycles, like laundry or dishes, that can really bring you down. The good news is that 1) I get to work outside and the weather truly is gorgeous here in Sonoma County, and 2) I have a wonderful little helper to keep me company.

If only I could get her to clean up her garden tools. Ahem.

The Little Miss and I have started planning out and planting our front yard victory garden. Almost all of our perennial plants have resurfaced, so we’re focusing on cleaning up those beds and making room for our vegetables.

Last year we planted potatoes, chard, carrots and lettuce in the front yard:

This year we’re shaking things up, rotating the location of our crops, and planting peas, (keeping the same) chard, and tomatoes:

Last year the raised bed contained tomatoes, zucchini, herbs and strawberries:

This year we’re devoting the bed to strawberries, with a few leftover pea plants (that we couldn’t find another spot for) and some (yet to be planted) herbs:

Tonight the temperature is supposed to drop to freezing, so I’ve laid out our frost blanket. We’ll see if the crops survive! We’re all about the garden drama here in the wilds of Northern California.

“Mom, what is that?”

“An egret.”

“Oh, he belongs in water.” (We drove past a group of SEVEN egrets last week standing in shallow water on the way home from the grocery store. The girl remembers EVERYTHING.)

Well, it’s pretty darn wet out there.

In most parts of North America “April showers bring May flowers.” Here in Sonoma County it rains consistently from November through April and then we (typically) have a dry summer. Only a few weeks more of this rain and then our spring will really begin…

Time to say goodbye to the winter garden:

And get ready to plant for spring.

In that vein, we’ve started reading a number of fantastic gardening books. Here’s a glimpse of some of our favorites from this week:

Shown above:
+ Planting a Rainbow by Lois Ehlert (vibrant illustrations and a simple story depicting the process of planning, planting, and picking flowers in a garden that children can easily relate to)
+ My Garden by Kevin Henkes (an imaginative tale about what a little girl would have in her very own garden, such as morning glories that stayed open all night, jellybean trees, flowers that grew back as soon as you picked them (above), and all carrots would be invisible because “I don’t like carrots.”)
+ Gardening with Children by Brooklyn Botanic Garden (a must-read book for family gardeners, full of gardening activities introducing nature’s cycles and earth’s ecology)
+ Eating the Alphabet: Fruits & Vegetables from A to Z (not directly about gardening per se but a beautifully illustrated alphabet book about fruits and vegetables; great inspiration for deciding what to plant in the garden!)