I love Fall. A lot. I actually get giddy about Fall. Maybe some of it is that the kids are already sleeping in a good 1 hour later than in the summer. Thank you, shorter days! And I cannot lie, I’m done with Summer and the too bright sun. On the first day of Fall, I made chicken pot pie and soon I’ll be making all kinds of soups! Fall and Winter cooking and baking is my favorite kind. Thoughts of things to make for Christmas are running through my head. But there’s also a feeling in the air that everything is slowing down. Fall just has this quiet exciting changing feeling for me.
My garden is loving the relief from the high heats (though at the moment Summer is giving it’s last little go at 100° temperatures.) All my plants started in Spring are in their prime now. Our little apple tree has started growing! I had been holding my breath for it and watering and watching it and weeding around it (some.) Yes, that is an apple tree among our tall weeds.
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| apple tree in the midst of weeds |
I cannot wait for the rain to return and transform our backyard into something less of a fire hazard. Another cause for the hope of that is this. My husband got a riding mower and it came with a free tilling attachment. SO excited about this. Visions of greenness in my head!
We’ll be seeding grass in part of the back yard and maybe preparing a larger garden for next Spring. I finally feel like I’m getting the hang of the seasons where I live. Fall is still Fall with the colorful leaves and cooler but not cold temperatures. The crazy thing to a mid-west girl like me, is that it’s also like a second Spring here. Our growing season is so long that the I am doing a Fall/Winter garden. All the early spring things like lettuce, broccoli, kale, peas, and chard are growing nicely.
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| lettuce seedling |
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| peas |
We are also settling nicely into our homeschool routine for the year and though it was a lot of hard work in the transition stage back to school this year, things are going smoothly now. I’m doing a Charlotte Mason approach at least for our science this year. This includes lots of nature exploration and discovery. They love to take their nature journals on our little trips into the wilderness and document what we find and learn. We’re talking about all living things right now and have been exploring microorganisms. Right along with Fall and our theme, we decided to save some tomato seeds. It’s super easy and fun and scientific! In nature when ripe tomatoes fall to the ground they rot. Then they lay in the cold ground all winter and when Spring comes the warm temperature wakes up the hibernating seeds and they grow into new plants. To copy this ourselves, and be able to save seeds from some of our best producing plants, we fermented the seeds. This kid’s just loved this gross science experiment! All they did is scoop out seeds and pulp from inside the tomatoes into a glass jar. Then we covered it with cheesecloth or other light fabric and let it sit in a warm place for about 5 days.
Mold will grow on the surface of the water and that is what you want.
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| Mold… Ew! |
The mold eats the outer cover of the seed, along with many tomato plant diseases. I let the kids look closely at the mold and smell it. It stinks! That’s the gases that the mold produces. We talked about how mold eats and multiplies and spreads through spores in the air, and produces wastes. These are all clues that it’s alive! We also talked about how useful it was for the tomato seeds. And about how mold is bad for our bodies and the strong smell is a signal not to eat food that has mold on it. Nature is a wonder! After the tomato slurry molded over we scooped the mold off the top with a spoon and threw it away (or put it in the compost bin. It’s also great for breaking down all that organic matter.) Then we dumped the seeds and pulp into a strainer and run water over it while we stirred with a spoon.
It took a while to get rid of all the pulp, but we kept at it until their were only seeds left. Next, with the spoon, we spread the seeds out on wax paper and let them dry.
Don’t put them on paper towel to dry or blot them with paper towel. They will stick like crazy! We let them sit in a dry cool place and stirred them up a bit every few days. After a couple weeks they were completely dry and we put them in a little paper envelope. Don’t forget to label it with the year and type of tomato plant. This is an awesome chance to make cool little envelopes for them. But I didn’t.
Store them in the fridge to mimic the Winter temperatures and have fun planting your own seeds next year. I have some third generation seeds in my fridge now and it’s fun to think we can do it ourselves if we want to. Even a two year old knows how awesome it is to be able to do something “myself.”