Ross Farm Museum

Geese on the Pond...
Rose Cottage where today they were baking biscuits and cookies and making butter. Wild Thing was afraid of the steep stairs and Nature Girl wants to move in!
Wild Thing of course spent loads of time with the chickens.
The pigs are our hands down favourite animals there though. They play like dogs, they like getting petted and tickled behind the eyes and scratched on the back. They answer you when you talk to them. Look at that face.

We had such a good time we got a year pass. Every weekend through the winter they fun events, and snowshoe and x country ski trails and no tourists clogging up the joint! They have special programs where kids get to go and in period dress learn everything about farming in the mid 1800's. Next year we'll sign Nature Girl up, she is so excited!

A little update...

Picasa sits there spinning and spinning every time I try to post pictures. But life goes on even without photos.

Wild Thing is very involved in writing things right now. He is making comic books that combine Bionicles (he has none here, he just likes them and had us print out pictures of them which he coloured and cut out and carries around in a shoebox) with knights and pirates. He is making birthday cards (addressed to himself) and asking for letters every day.

Nature Girl is working on exercising her arm - which is still out of shape and inflexible but 70% healed. SHe visits the ortho in 3 more weeks but in the meantime I will be taking her to see the osteopath. It is CREEPY that she can't straighten her arm or bend it. It gets better each day, but still, it looks creepy and wrong.

She has been INITIATING lots of math stuff with the help of a library book that I believe to be worth its weight in gold - but I can't find even second hand right now! Called "Math for Fun Projects" The library will let me keep it til someone else puts a hold on it (Thank you lovely librarians who also homeschool!).

She spends most of her quiet time reading. She's rereading Sewell's Black Beauty right now.

We discovered the greatest series called "Our Canadian Girl" Twelve female protagonists, all 10-13 years old, from across Canada and spanning from the 16oo's to the 1950's. We read the first two books about a New England Planter girl who moves to our area following the Acadian expulsion and befriends an Acadian girl her age who remains a prisoner, though who's family is allowed to stay to work on maintaining the dykes.. We just finished the first in a series of four about a little girl from a south shore fishing village during WWII. She is loving these and they have opened up tons of discussions around the dinner table. Darkmirror studied the Acadian Expulsion in History class this fall as well (they're finishing up WWI right now). Our Canadian Girl has a website and we plan to visit it tomorrow.

Noggins Farm Corn Maze

First you take your flag, in case you get lost in the maze and they need to "extract you". Wild Thing insisted on a red flag.

The map of the maze and the observation platform for those who want to watch.

Nature Girl mapping her way through the maze. She was ruthlessly efficient. Ruthless I say!

Papa Pan worrying we're going to be stuck feeding cranky napless Sprout cow corn for dinner. Never fear I found a huge crop of chickweed to tide him over.

Apple Picking at Noggins

No horse drawn wagon this time, this is a big commercial orchard they have tractors!

No one minded the lack of horses (they do have miniature horses when we get back).

We're almost at the orchard!!!!

Taste testing the rare Kestral apple (unless you live in Nova Scotia you've probably never tried one - they are delicious but don't keep well for export. Apples straight from the orchard are completely unlike anything you've ever bought in the store).

Simple Machines - The Incline Plane

The slide fanatics think these are wicked.

RAces - more mass means Nature Girl won every time.

Papa Pan was nervous about letting Sprout go on his own until I reminded him about that mass thing, and the fact that the leading cause of toddlers breaking their legs is silly adults taking them down the slide in their laps because "it is safer". He slide down SO slowly it was really funny.

There was a tantrum when it was time to leave, less napping, more sliding!

Simple Machines at Noggin's Farm

The pumping game uses levers and an incline plane to make ... FUN!

More pumping less duckie hoarding!

Nothing better than starting an afternoon outside in really cold weather, than by getting really wet.

Okay you three, enough of these boring science demonstrations, lets go eat some apples!

Making Pan Pipes STEP TWO

Papa Pan and Nature Girl learning about pitch and panpipes.

Make notes about the different notes you want to make and approximate lengths to cut pipes.

Papa Pan helps Nature Girl with cutting because she only has one arm.

Next they experimented with drying them in the oven.

GOLDENROD DOES NOT CAUSE HAYFEVER!

I put a comment on this in the post on our goldenrod wildcrafting but I think it is important enough to give a whole post to.

This is taken from an About.com article on ragweed.

Ragweed Allergy:

As with so many plants considered baneful in the 21st century, giant ragweed was used medicinally by the denizens of tougher eras. But when one thinks of the plant nowadays, one thing comes to mind, and that is "ragweed allergy." Together, common ragweed and giant ragweed account for most of the hay fever experienced in North America in the fall. Symptoms of ragweed allergy are sneezing and runny nose, along with itchy eyes.

Goldenrod, another weed, is commonly blamed for causing this "hay fever." But goldenrod is merely a victim of circumstance: it just happens to bloom at the same time of year (late summer-early fall) as ragweed. Being by far the more conspicuous of the two, goldenrod has become the scapegoat for ragweed allergy. The fact is that goldenrod pollen is sticky and can be spread only by insects, not the wind. By contrast, ragweed pollen floats off easily on the gentlest of breezes -- much to the regret of your sinuses!

Making Panpipes STEP ONE

Gather a local plant that offers a hollow pith. Papa Pan used the saw and we chose Japanes Knotweed because it's green in the fall still, in spring we'd pick sturdier willow.

Nature Girl with young growth. See how it looks like bamboo.

Nature Girl uses pruning shears to trim off little side branches and leaves. Watch you don't snip off your fingers!

A clean branch ready to come home.

Wildcrafting Lesson - Golden Rod

Golden rod is really easy to identify. There are plenty of individual varieties of it, but they all work the same way. If you get autumn honey chances are it's goldenrod honey. Besides smelling sweet and looking pretty it's good for coughs and colds, and for urinary tract infections. It's a gentle herb and easy to put up.

First you snip it up with scissors.

You fill a jar with your snipped up pieces. To check to see if you have too little, too much, or just the right amount bounce your finger fairies on the bed of flowers. Too little, the finger fairy falls through. Too much and there's no bounce, just right it is soft and springy and you stay on top.

Then you fill it to the brim with apple cider vinegar. It's already turning yellow! Cover it, label it and put in a dark closet for about a month, then strain. You can add your goldenrod vinegar to meals and salad dressings or take it with honey!

Nature's flu shot!

If we had access to a school like the Lewes New School Homeschooling Wouldn't be Necessary

Butternut

Butternut leaves drying for tea

Butternuts drying out so we can crack them to get out the meat.

Our neighbour Summer, who owns Pumpkin Moon Herbals, http://www.pumpkinmoonherbals.com/ invited us over to harvest her butternuts (white walnuts). She explained that the leaves made a really nice tea and that medicinally an infusion was good for constipation. She needed to do a bit of pruning so we brought home whole branches to dry. The nutshells are good as a vermifuge (they expel WORMS) So we'll be using EVERYTHING we brought home.

The butternut is a native species and the Mi'kmaq used it medicinally, for food, and as a natural brown dye. We'll be dying a silk with nutshells.

The butternut is threatened by a non native blight and Summer explained to us that organic farmers and herbalists should make a point of planting butternut trees to ensure they aren't an endangered species. It really is a wonderful tree!

Open Farm Day Monty Python's Apple Orchard

Richard Hennigar is absolutely passionate about organic sustainable orchards. His orchards produce the kid's favorite treat - Suprima (Shivers) popsicles. His other passion is Trancendental Meditation (http://www.tm.org) We visited his orchard and learned all about his farming practices. They're very different than the big commercial orchards that spray that surround Wolfville!

A big part of orchard management is taking the time to study what is going on in your orchard and the surrounding environment. Richard has these flypapers sprinkled through the orchard. They allow him to keep track of a single fly called the "Apple Maggot Fly" They have black zigzags on their wings. This one had caught one fly. We learned about the fly's life cycle and how they can devastate an orchard without proper management. Management here does not mean spraying. So Richard has worked very hard to get rid of neglected abandoned apple trees and hawthorne trees within a kilometre of his orchard. The province used to help out by giving apple tree owners an ultimatum - pick up your fallen apples, spray your trees, cut down your trees, or they'll cut them down for you. They don't anymore though. So Richard and other organic growers take it upon themselves to find and weed out the problem trees.

Because Richard doesn't mow his orchards (more on this!) he has HUGE anthills in the orchard. Ants are more important than worms to soil health, they aerate dry soils earthworms can't touch and they mine minerals to bring to the surface - like sulphur.

This video explains how Richard manages the grass in his orchard without any fossil fuels. It takes12 hours to flatten an acre, but it only needs to be done once a season and the grasses enrich the soil as a natural mulch.

Here are the kids helping Richard flatten his grasses. I can see why he doesn't hire children to roll out the grass, but they sure had fun!

We learned that the fallen apples get sold to big juice producers. The waste left over from pressing cider gets sold to an organic pig producer nearby. Nothing goes to waste in the orchard.

We got to try all sorts of apples and ended our visit with popsicles!

Open Farm Day - a few more favorites from Hidden Meadow Farm

The dinosaur chicken runs with babies on her back..

The puffball is indeed another chicken!

Muscovy ducks look particularly strange when caught with a flash!

More of Wild Things absolute favorite chickens.