Peaceful Mind Globe

I recently found a great book called Just Us Girls: 48 Creative Art Projects for Mothers and Daughters to Do Together. This book has a lot of fun and creative crafts that use nature and things you can find around the house and yard. The first project we set out to make was Peaceful Mind Globes.

These use jars, water, food coloring, glycerin, glitter and glue. Fill the jars with distilled water, then add food coloring.

Next add glycerin and glitter.

Mix it up a little to see if you have enough of each item.

Finally glue the lid on and shake!

The final result is a colorful glittery jar, sort of like a snow globe but is supposed to bring peace and calmness as you look at it and watch the glitter swirl around.

Garlic

We planted garlic in the garden over a year ago, recently my brother decided it was time to harvest it. We used the seedling shelves to lay the garlic plants out to dry.

The garlic has blossoms on it that need to be separated.

Kevin and Katie have been working on this.

The small seed, bulb part will be able to be planted for future garlic plants.

Grapes and Beets

This year my garden is really not taking off, usually I would have a whole bunch of posts highlighting all of the bounty from the garden...but not this year. We have pulled two small zucchini, grapes and beets. Not sure what the problem is this year but we have not given up yet!

Here are the grapes. I went to Las Vegas for the annual gathering of librarians known as ALA. When I got home I looked into my back yard and found a nice purple surprise! In a few weeks the green grapes should be ready as well.

Also a little over a week ago I was weeding the garden and noticed the beets were ready. I pulled all of them not sure if they were going to be ok, some were huge which usually means they will be fibrous. This was by far the largest crop of beets I have had survive. 

A day after picking them we canned them There were a variety of types of beets but we cooked them and canned them. They were delicious! We did two canning methods, the smaller beets were left whole and the larger ones were sliced.

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Cherries!

This year we decided to go cherry picking in Leona Valley. Ten pounds of delicious cherries later I decided we should make jam. I found two recipes in Blue Ribbon Preserves, one for a Cherry Conserve and another for Cherry Jam.

Here is the conserve which has sliced almonds:

And here is the Cherry Jam:

So far we have only tried the jam but it was quite tasty!