We took the old weedy messing teabed infront of the barn and turned it into a butterfly/hummingbird garden as part of our botany project.  I wish that I had thought to take pictures of it before we even started on it. 


After we added the plants.


View from the house looking up.


View from the hill looking down.

The boys really got into the creation of it.  They enjoyed picking out and buying the plants and as well as planting, mulching, and placing the boarder!   It was a lot of fun and we are very proud of the outcome of our work. 

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Spring is officially here at our place.  I planted garden this morning as part of our science so it is now official.  The boys and I planted 4 lbs of onion sets, regular peas and sugar snap peas, lettuce, spinach, carrots, and radishes.  We are so excited to get our food into the ground and growing.

Before planting, I walked down to our neighbor's home to see if we could expand our garden.  (We use a part of their 2nd garden and they have told us in the past we could use as much of it as we wanted Because all of their children are grown and gone with the exception of one son.  I wanted to make sure the offer still stood.  As much as my boys have been eating, we need to put up more this summer! LOL) 

I am really looking forward to this summer.  We are going to have a lot of fun digging in the dirt this year and since we are studying Botony, gardening will be extra fun and special!  LOL  Oh and this will be the first year that we let some of the plants go to seed so we can save seeds for our own seed collections!  What fun!!!!

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We have been really enjoying Botony.  DT wasn't sure that it would be fun when he first learned that our study after Astronomy was going to be Botony.  His exact words where, "Mom, that is going to be boring!  Can't we study sea creatures instead?"  I made a deal that we would start out with Botony but if that is really boring and he hates it, we would switch to Swimming Creatures.  Well, he is finding out that botony isn't borning and he loves it!  His younger brothers do, too!

Here is a picture of our light hut.  We have basil, lavendar, parsely, and chamomille planted in it.  Each boy has row.  Well our 2 yo doesn't he has spinach growing on our window sill.

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I was trying to think of a cute, catchy title for this entry but am just not feeling creative enough for that at the moment.  We have had the stomach virus visit our house this week and it hasn't been fun!  JM came down with it Monday night and was sick all day Tuesday.  The Wed afternoon the other 3 boys all got sick.  I thought I was coming down with it Wed AM because I was feeling quesy so I asked dh to take JM to the cardiologist.  He did but I never did feel more than just tired and quesy all day.  So we did school and I caught up on the laundry.

We are finishing up our Exploring Creation with Astronomy studies and having a blast in the meantime.  We didn't to the rocket experiment from the Saturn chapter so we are doing that as well as the cloud one this week.  (Neptune, like Jupiter and Saturn, has storms raging.  W simulate a storm cloud to see what a storm may look like on the planet.  Of course a storm cloud on a gas planet would not be made of water vapor but it was a fun experiment anyway!  

We used very hot water, ziploc bag full of ice, and a lit match.  (The smoke from the match supplies some particles in the air above the water.)  We learned that the inner core of each planet is very hot (represented by the hot water), while the gases that make up its atmosphere are extremely cold (represented by the ice).  Gases rise from the hot core but turn into liquids adn then solids when they get cooled off in the ice cold atmosphere.

The boys also made rockets.  Next on our agenda is to launch our rockets.  We just need the Alka-Seltzer and film canister so that we can finish our experiment.  

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The boys found four Eastern Black Swallowtail Butterfly caterpillars on our parsely plants. JT wanted to watch them change into butterflies so we took two of them and put them in a gallon jar along with some parsley and sticks. We have been watching them eat, eat, eat, eat. LOL We observed them spinning a few silk threads to attach to the stick and then forming a chrysalis. Now it's a waiting game. It's really neat because the chrysalis looks like another little branch on the stick. It's interesting to me that they both chose the same stick to form their chrysalises on even though their were 3 sticks to choose from. It appears that they over winter in their chrysalis if formed in the fall. I wonder if we will not see our butterflies until spring or if ours will come out yet this fall?

A few helpful links on raising a Black Swallowtail Butterfly and From Chrysalis to butterfly.
A site with pictures of the life cycle of a black swallowtail butterfly.

I am still trying to find out if I should keep a sponge in the bottom of the jar and keep moist all winter or if I should just moisten it in the spring before the expected emerging. If anyone knows please LMK. I have yet to find specific info on this. What I have found points to the latter but I want to be sure to do this right! LOL

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