Strategic Use of Jelly

While Daddy and Mama were busy rototilling and planting the vegetable gardens, the boys spent their day frolicking in the spring flowers.  

 For those of you with little ones, I highly recommend convincing your children to make their very own Dandelion Jelly.  The whole process is insanely easy and yet incredibly time consuming (for them) which gives the parent some free time (or, in our case, time to work in the garden without dealing with constant bickering and whining).

The boys began today by picking more dandelion heads because our first round of picking earlier this week "went limp too fast" for us to make into jelly (oops?).  So, Liam and Seamus got busy on Round 2 of picking duty.  This kept them occupied for well over an hour with very minimal supervision required since we have so many dandelions that they did not need to be remotely near each other to be surrounded by an abundance of flowers and even a few of our honey bees.

After picking the flowers, the boys sat down and pinched off the green base of each flower and put the remaining petals into a pitcher.  They each had their own bowl of flower heads, own pitcher and own discard bowl - tada!  Another hour of "independent play".  Woohoo!

Next I poured boiling water over the petals and we will allow this to steep for 24 hours to make dandelion tea which will then be made into jelly.  That is a project for another day.

In sum, while the kids worked very hard on making "their very own batch" of dandelion jelly, Mama and Daddy got the first kitchen garden planted (tomatoes, carrots, turnip, rutabaga, beets, red onions, daikon, and breakfast radishes) and the second garden all tilled up.  

It was most definitely a win-win day for all...well, except maybe for Alistair who was more than happy to eat freezies after being outside but was much less enthused about his carrots at supper.  Oh well, I guess even on good days everyone can't win them all!