Summer’s Here

Even though the meteorological summer doesn’t start for a few more weeks, Memorial Day is past, school’s out for most of the corporations in the area, and I’ve got a bit of a tan, so I say summer’s here.

And because school is out, that means my source of income has dried up for the next two and a half months.  I’ll still get one more small paycheck for working the last couple of days of school, but it won’t be much.  I’ve got my name on the list for two temp services, but for some reason I don’t hold out a lot of hope there.

Stephan’s been busy with ice sculptures the past couple of weeks, and he may do some roofing this summer as well.  Thankfully, our garden is growing well, which will ease our grocery bill (and make our tummies happy!)

There are two things that are helping to keep me from panicking about how we’ll make it through the summer.  The first is that we do have savings.  I hope not to have to use much of it, but it’s there if we need it.

The second is that God asked me to trust him.  And I believe he won’t let us down.

I don’t know what that will look like, and it might not be what we imagine.  But I think he’ll take care of us.

Subbing with A Week and a Half Left in the School Year

On Wednesday, I filled in for a middle school science teacher.  When I got there, the teacher next door (Mrs. S.) warned me that the classes I would have are really rowdy, and that the teacher normally in that class has pretty much given up on trying to rein them in.  Great.  And Mrs. S. said that my 8th period class would be especially challenging.  Super.

So I put on my in-charge face, which is the face I usually wear when subbing, but I put it on a little more firmly that morning.  Things weren’t terrible.  The kids talked when they weren’t supposed to and a few of them were wandering around the room and trying to switch seats so that I would be confused (but doing it in a totally obvious way so that I wasn’t confused) but I managed to keep relative control.

Eighth period was indeed the worst.  The last period of the day is often the worst behaved.  I think part of that is because the kids are tired and they want to go home, but I also think that teachers expect last period to be poorly behaved and they project that expectation so the students live up to it.  Anyway, the students were talking during their test (mostly complaining about other people being loud, which of course just makes things louder), and I saw one kid cheating off another (and that other kid letting him) and they were just really rude and unruly.  It was not enjoyable.’

After school, I stopped by Mrs. S’s room and said, “You weren’t kidding about that 8th period class.”

She said, “Well, it sounded like you had everything under control.  The students didn’t sound any worse for you than they do for the regular teacher.”

That was a little bit encouraging, I guess.

Then Mrs. S. said, “In fact, my kids were saying how quiet it was next door and they wanted to know if your class was even in there.  I told them that the classes were taking a test, but yes they were there and they had a sub.  The students asked,  ’Who’s the sub? ‘ and I said ‘Mrs. K.’  The students said, ‘Ohhhhh, she’s strict.’  And one of them asked, ‘Was she in the Army or something?’”

I cracked up.  (I was never in the Army, by the way.)  It made me laugh that they think I’m military in my classroom management.

But you have to be at the best of times as a substitute teacher — and especially when there are less than two weeks left in the school year and the classroom teacher has already given up on maintaining order.

Water Wagon

It’s been just about the driest spring I can remember.  And in our community garden, we’re not allowed to use hoses.  I guess that’s because of the risk of dragging your hose through someone else’s plot and damaging their plants.  So watering has to be done with buckets or watering cans.  We’ve got a wagon that we fill with buckets.  We fill the buckets with water at the spigot, then put the buckets in the wagon and roll our wagon to our plots and put the water on the garden.  We figure the wagon holds about 20 gallons, and it usually takes about two wagon loads to adequately water each of our three plots.  So that’s 40 gallons for 3 plots, equaling 120 gallons each time we water.  And we water about twice a week if it doesn’t rain.  Stephan thinks it could use more water than that, but that most plants can get by with what we give them.

When we water, we really try to drench the soil.  We see some of our gardening neighbors sprinkling their plots with just enough water to make the plot look  wet, but not enough, it would seem, to really get enough moisture to the roots.  (Stephan calls it “the Holy Water treatment” because it’s just a sprinkle.)

If it would just rain a little more often…

Berry Blooms

Looks like we’re going to have a few berries this year.

There are blooms on the raspberry bush…

As well as on one of our two blueberry bushes.  I wish I could remember which bush was which.  One has pink lemonade blueberries and the other… well, I can’t even remember what it’s called.  I think this one is not the pink lemonade one, but I didn’t mark them so I’m not certain.

Also, I picked two more ripe strawberries this weekend for a grand total of four.  Hooray!  And there are more that are ripening.

Plan C = Plan A

Earlier this week, there was a big package on our porch.  ”What’s this?” I asked Stephan, since it was addressed to him.

“Lights for aquaponics,” he replied.

I was confused.  I had thought the plan was to use a greenhouse so that we wouldn’t have to have lights (or at least not as many, since we might eventually need supplemental lighting.)

“Oh,” Stephan said when I told him this.  ”I guess I didn’t let you in on my entire thought process.”

Basically, after doing a lot of reading and research, he realized that building a greenhouse was in fact going to be more expensive than purchasing lights, and while he still wants to do that eventually, he feels that at this time, it makes more sense to get started in our room above the garage, where we’d be planning to have the set-up all along.

So now we have lights.  We have grow beds, the fish tank, air pumps, and a heater.  We still need grow media, but Stephan knows where he is going to get it.  Then we’ll need seedlings, and a couple of months later, the fish.  There is a local aquaponics operation that will sell us tilapia fingerlings (baby fish) at the best price we’ve found.

I’m starting to feel like maybe we might be possibly almost there.

May I Redirect You?

I was subbing today — first at the high school, and then at the middle school (it was a crazy day) and I overheard students at both schools talking about a local girl who took her own life because she felt she couldn’t endure the bullying she faced.

And then, I was reading one of my favorite blogs, Slambfriend, and saw that Sara has a series going right now about bullying.  She has some really excellent thoughts.  In fact, I feel like she took the thoughts out of my brain and put words to them — especially the second post.

Here is her first post in the series: Hurt People Hurt People 

Here is her second post in the series: Let Me Tell You Who You Are

Sara says she’ll probably have at least three posts in this series, so check her blog again later this week for more thoughts from her.

 

 

Good News

Last night, I dreamed that I got up to find snow on the ground, and I was upset because I feared for the tomato plants.  The good news is that no such thing happened.  No snow today!

In other good news, Stephan said I was wrong about losing all the Sunsugar tomatoes.  He said we still have a few.  (I apparently didn’t look very carefully.)  That makes me happy because those are my favorites!  They are like candy!

Also, we ate the first two strawberries from our patch today, and they were yummy.  That’s good news, too!

Great weather for gardening

Finally, we’ve gotten some much-needed rain, and things are coming up in the garden like crazy!  Stephan and I walked over to the community garden this afternoon, and we were very excited about what we saw.  I didn’t think to take my camera with me, so I don’t have any photos to share, but I will tell you what we saw.

First, the tomatoes aren’t totally lost.  A few plants were obviously dead — we’ll have to start over with the Sunsugar variety since none of them survived — but several of the others seemed to be coming back pretty well.

About three or four corn plants are coming up, as well as some summer squash and zucchini.  The turnips, beets, spinach, and lettuces are coming up, and the potatoes and onions look fantastic!  There are a couple of pumpkins, acorn squashes, and cucumber plants popping out.

At home, we’ve got two strawberries that have turned red, and I think there are two blooms on the raspberry bush.  It also looks like our new blueberry bushes are about to bloom.

Hooray for produce!

Aquaponics Supplies

We got some stuff the other day to further our venture into aquaponics.

First, some pumps to keep the fishies aerated and happy.

Also, a heater, to keep them toasty warm.

Happy fish will help grow yummy veggies, which means for happy me!

Rethinking Aquaponics

As we’ve been doing some gardening over the past couple of years, we’ve learned some things.  First, our back yard is in only partial sun, so some things don’t grow well there.  The community garden is in full sun, but is more exposed to wind and frost.

In conjunction with those things we’ve learned, Stephan has been thinking about aquaponics.  The space we were planning to do it in is not heated, and it would need grow lights.  Stephan started thinking that putting the operation in a greenhouse would at least eliminate the need for lighting.  He asked what I thought about it.  I said, “Well, I’m guessing it would cost more initially, but then the electricity costs would be lower.”  Stephan said that actually, the initial cost would not be that much higher because he was planning to get LED lights which are pretty expensive.  (The LED lights would have a lower electricity cost than fluorescent lights.)

So, the plan at this point is to put a greenhouse into the space where our little backyard garden was the past two summers.  That means a lot of moving of all the stuff Stephan built and assembled in the space above our garage.  I’ll take photos as we get there and start working on this project again.