Welcome Fall!

Fall is my absolute favorite season! The changes in nature are so dramatic and beautiful. I love harvest time, too! All the hours of planning, prepping, watching and watering come to fruition. It is so satisfying to harvest your own food. But there is nothing that brings me joy quite like my pumpkin patch! I always plant extra because I love the beautiful blooms, the jumbo leaves and sharing the wonderful, orange globes with others. 

This year we planted Jack-o-laterns and sugar baby pumpkins. We kept several for ordemental purposes and processed several as well. We even toasted our seeds for a yummy snack. Now we can pull a jar of grown-in-our-garden pumpkin puree from our pantry and make a yummy treat all winter long.

I am already picking my varity for next year and begging James to make my patch four times the size of this years. My patch this year may or may not have been four times the size of last year!

TIP: to grow round, non-odd shaped pumpkins, place pumpkin bottom down, (when it is possible with out damaging the vine) as soon as possible on a paper plate or a ceramic tile. This takes the pressure off the sides of the pumpkin as it grows and helps ot have a beautiful, uniform shape.

Literature study and poetry

 "The Scavengers"  

by Michael Perry

Novel summary: 

In Ford Falcon's world, people live UnderBubble or OutBubble-in the protected cities or in the wilderness without electricity, gasoline, or any modern conveniences. Her family lives OutBubble in a slapdash shelter on Skullduggery Ridge near Goldmine Gully, an old trash heap where they scavenge for lumber and supplies. A partnership of government and corporations have genetically modified URCorn, a miracle food that makes people stronger and healthier. That is, if you can eat it. And the GreyDevils, strange creatures, human mostly, will do anything for URCorn. Anything. Add in solar bears and weird weather that can't decide whether it is summer or snow and you can bet life is not easy. But there's something much more mysterious going on, and Ford Falcon things it has something to do with her father. 

We read "The Scavengers" this semester and are working our way through the Progeny Press study guide for the book. In the book the main character, Ford Falcon, shares a love of poetry with her mother, specifically Emily Dickenson's poems. So, we have been doing a bit of poetry reading and I assigned the children some writing assignments. We studied about alliterations and consonance, a flow of sounds and words that create an almost musical effect. Alliteration is a poetic device in which a beginning consonant sound is repeated for dramatic impact. Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds in the middle of words. An assonance is the reputation of vowel sound repeated in a sentence.  The following poems don't follow these rules exactly, and really they are more humorous that musical, but they were written with the thoughts of alliteration, consonance and assonance in mind.

Hope you enjoy. 

Hillbilly Hay

by Mundan Welte

"Hillbilly hay" that's what people say

when they see the over stocked trailer coming their way.

Some might say it is the wrong way.

But rather they shake their head and say 

"My, oh, my! Hillbilly hay!"

Farming is Charming

By Matyus Welte

Farming, from the outside, doesn't look charming.

But its argument is very disarming, this you might find alarming.

But a simple look and you will be hooked.

Now that we shook the lie that our government cooked,

in one of their meetings, listen to this pleading!

We are farmers needing, if you want to keep eating.