Peas in front beds (back of each)
Front: Burpee Dark Seeded Early Perfection (65 days=week of 0524)
Back: Super Sugar Snap (same time)

In front bed:
Three sets of beats (60 days=week of 0517)
Burpee Cherry Bell Radishes (22 days= April 15th)

It’s everywhere.

But it has the greatest nickname: Creeping Charlie.

I’m going to try and pull and put into pots. It’ll grow in shade, right?

SSE — Mizuma
SSE — Reine Des Glaces
SSE — Green Oak Leaf
Burpee x2 Winter Marvel (75 — first week of June?)
Burpee x2 Giant Caesar (70 — first week of June?)
Burpee Rougette de Montpelier (45 — first week of May?)

Packets from grandma:

The Butchart Gardens
Two Rows: African Daisy
Two Rows: Calendula
Two Rows: Cosmos (Sensation Mix)
Two Rows: Nasturium

I’ve never planted or intentionally grown flowers. We’ll see how it goes…

“Birds will take advantage of a tailwind, and when the wind is blowing the other way, they’ll hole up. They won’t exhaust their strength going against that wind for long when they’d make only a few miles a day or get blown backward. They rest, because if they rest that day and restore their strength, the next day they can more than make up what they lost by not going…They change their course year after year on the basis of the particular situation. They never come back exactly the same way twice because the conditions are never the same, but they always get to their destination. They have a purpose, a goal. They know where they are going, but they zigzag and they change tactics according to the situation.”

Myles Horton, The Long Haul: An Autobiography (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999),80.

Quoted in
Sapon-Shevin, Mara, and Nancy Schniedewind, Educational Courage: Resisting the Ambush of Public Education. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012).
Full citation of article later…

Collards (Ferry-Morse): Old package, don’t have high hopes
Swiss Chard (Burpee)
White Chard (Burpee)
Fordhook Chard (Seeds of Change)
Red Russian Kale (SSE)

On third floor now in bright sun!

What makes this life good, ultimately, is that I spend my days thinking a tiny bit of the world into being, primarily by building a school into a sustainable institution, empowering other people through teaching, and challenging my own preconceptions through writing and furniture making. It is unremitting, demanding, repititive work. That goes without saying. The material of the world does not bend easily. Yet it is work that exercises creative muscle, work through which I construct my identity and map the world in a way that fulfills me and finds confirmation in others. Quite frankly, when I am at the school, I am in a place where I matter.

Korn, Peter. Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman. David R. Godine, Publisher, 2013.

(urgh…kindle version — find page number later.)

It feels weighty, real, this book. It’s a re-imagining of a portion of The Iliad as Malouf takes two sets of six lines and imagines a short novel. Couldn’t put it down.

This description of leadership struck me as particularly compelling:

“Holding in his head all the roads that lead out to the distant parts of his kingdom, he feels them at times as ribbons tied at the centre of him, for the most part loose but sometimes taut and pulling a little, according to what is happening out there — events that his body is aware of as dim foreboding long before the last relay of messengers, who for days have been running down dusty roads, burst in to deliver it as news.”

pp.43-44

Malouf, David. Ransom: A Novel. (New York: Vintage, 2011.)

As a family, we started listening to Anthony Doerr’s fantastic novel, All the Light We Cannot See, on our holiday drives. Now every time we get in the car, the kids demand it.

There’s one early scene that stuck with me and reminded me of the work I do (no spoilers, I promise). Werner, an orphan with an aptitude for electronics, has become the mining town’s go-to person for radio repair. At one point, he is sitting before a massive radio, staring at it, thinking through possibilities, and tracking the course of electricity through the box. He eventually identifies the problem and fixes it, much to the delight of his patron, who claims his success came from simply staring at the radio.

Lately I’ve been working on rebuilding my daughter’s closet. I seem to spend much of the time simply standing before the closet, sometimes with a notebook, sometimes with scrap paper, sometimes with nothing. I probably have spent hours just looking at the space, turning options over in my head, identifying potential problems, coming up with design ideas. It might look like I’m doing nothing but without that time, I’d be unable to move forward.

How do we make time and space for kids to do this in school? How do we create classrooms or work spaces that are free from tedium — no worksheets or unnecessary work — and where social pressures recede — most humans (not just teens) will fill space with talk, especially when the task is hard. It’s easier with engagement, I know: Werner loves the radio just as I like working on the house, which is another issue, but I still want to spend some time this year thinking about ways to make the quiet, thinking, staring into space time part of my classroom.