It’s good to make friends with your local farmers! On Tuesday, I was able to get out to the East York outdoor market to pick up a few freestone peaches. When I told one of the local farmers that the kids and I were thinking about making jam, she reached around to the back of […]
Archive | August, 2012
A Movable Mural
This weekend, we finished Our Big Summer Project – Our Outdoor Mural! Here’s how we got from point B to point Z, with a DIY recap at the very bottom of the page. Generating the Final Design Come up with a final sketch (or use an existing image) and print it in both colour and black and […]
The Imaginary Beasts of Riverdale Farm
August 13, 2012 Last year, we traveled to Riverdale Farm to sketch the farm animals, not knowing if the city and its mayor would pull financial support from the farm or if it would remain open to the public. We called these our Save the Riverdale Farm Sketches. With the farm saved from the chopping […]
Mad Scientist Day 2012: Ten “Sweet” Experiments
August 9, 2012 If Bea had Soap Making on the top of her Summer of Funner 2012 wish-list, the one thing that Tobes wanted to do was to “smash Skittles” [the kids absolutely love Skittles] and “make them into potions.” The kids’ idea of backyard “potion making,” however, isn’t very productive. They tend to take food or flowers […]
The Kids Make Street Eats (with Beer!): Pilsner Pretzels & Hops and Robbers Mustard
August 8, 2012 Just because you can’t walk into the liquor store and purchase a case of beer at the age of 7 or 9 (and for good reason!) doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy foods that are cooked with it, or, under supervision, even cook with them yourself. Today was Street Eats Day! We had […]
Glam Cans 2012: Kid-Designed Canning Labels DIY
2-5 August, 2012 On Thursday, we canned double batches of our newly jazzed up recipes for Bread & Butter Pickles and Sweet & Tangy Pickle Relish. As we were waiting for our veggies to brine in the fridge for a few hours, the kids, remembering the fun labels we created last year, used coloured pencils and oil pastel crayons to […]
Summer Activism 101: The Kids Investigate the Mega Quarry
Tuesday’s installment for our Summer of Funner Film Festival happened to be another Wes Anderson movie, The Fantastic Mr. Fox. The kids were particularly interested in the amount of underground digging performed both by the animal protagonists in flight and by the big three farmers in pursuit of them. They were also dumbfounded by the […]
Relish, Pickle, Replenish: It’s Cucumber Day
2 August, 2012 Last year’s Adventures in Canning were incredibly successful. The Chai Tea Jelly, Strawberry Jam, Lemon Balm & Lemon Verbena Jelly and Spiced Blueberry Port Jam we canned last Summer, Labeled in the Fall, and Decorated in the Winter were a big hit. We used tons of those jams and jellies in the […]
Outdoor Mural – Phase One – Sketching From Our Favourite Artists
Several years ago, decades ago, as the case may be, my husband and his parents painted an outdoor mural on a piece of plywood and installed it at the back left-hand corner of their garden. Whenever I even think of going over to their house, this is the image that comes to mind: a large face or mask, […]