Welcome to potions class, high hopes style.
Here are the instructions. Insist that each of the Harry Potter books be read out loud, together as a family. Link farm chores with additional reading. Kids are under the parent’s spells and gladly do work they may normally complain about! Today we read a few chapters while we prepared to make dilly beans – sitting around the kitchen table cleaning and cutting beans to the right length to stuff in jars.
Today we took our out-of-state guests to the Neil Smith National Wildlife Refuge and Prairie Learning Center near Prairie City, Iowa.
There is a beautiful interpretive center nestled into a prairie hillside. The site was at one time destined to be the site of a nuclear power plant, but those plans fell through, and it became the largest reconstructed prairie in North America. It is a grand experiment to try to turn corn and beans back into native vegetation to give those around here a small taste of what it might have been like when the first pioneers came this-away.
Blazing Star – commonly naturalized for home and butterfly gardens – liatris.
Cup plant – Saves water by the design of the stem and leaf – you’ll see this one is holding water just below the flower.
Here’s this week’s Thingamajig Thursday entry.
Also check out the last thingamajig answer.
As always, put your guess in a comment below.
Tonight we had a nearly all-farm meal for our guests, now joined by Linda’s Dad and his wife.
The menu tonight is marinated and applewood grilled extra-thick lamb chops (lamb and herbs from high hopes); less than day-old sweet corn from northern Marshall County; new potatoes fried with fennel and olive oil (potatoes from high hopes); fresh garden salad with feta (also from high hopes, except feta). Can it get any better than this?
The flowers and corn took off while we were gone. Of course, many of the glads bloomed in our absence.
Here’s Linda with a handful for a bouquet for the house. This week we have Linda’s sister’s family from CA visiting us – so we’ll have two weeks of vacation in a row, only one will be at home.