Our Little Urban Garden, Part 4

Dateline: April 14

It was finally time to get some of our seeds in the ground. It has been fun watching our son get into the gardening and growing stuff. He wants to do everything daddy does!

Raking. Sam needs a little help!

A lesson on how to push the seeds into the soil.

Intently watching the seeds.

Time to water everything.

We planted carrots, lettuce and onions on this day. Crossing our fingers that they actually take off and grow well in our little urban garden!

Project: Butterfly Birthday Party

A very special thank you to my grandmother who LOVES butterflies. You cannot go anywhere in her home and not be surrounded by the beautiful creatures. What better theme for her 85th birthday celebration than butterflies. You already saw what I consider the main attraction. Here are just a few other decorations that we put together for the big day.

We found a perfect box at Michaels that is meant to look like a book. The "book" has pictures of
butterflies all over it. Guests placed birthday cards in the box. It was a perfect accompaniment to the guestbook.

I made a guestbook for everyone to sign. Instead of the boring, "just sign on this line to say
you were here," I used some butterfly pictures my friend Brent let me use as the background to
each page and used scanned pictures of grandma as a child, young adult and now as a grandma to
1 granddaughter, 4 grandsons and 2 great-grandsons. It was a perfect addition to the party
and a nice way for her to look back on the day. 

My mom made this lovely butterfly bouquet. I guess I probably get some of my craftiness from her!

Each table had either a hurricane lamp or wine glasses in the middle of the table flanked by two vases
with white and yellow daisies (some of grandma's favorite flowers). We added little butterflies
to the table as a quick splash of color throughout each table.

The florist did the arrangement in the hurricane lamp sitting on the guestbook table.
She did a beautiful job with the yellow roses and daisies.

Under the wine glasses, we placed some greenery and daisies.
We placed votive candles on the stem of the glass. They were very pretty.

Our simple food table.

Edible Butterfly Life Cycle

It looks like I'll be in "butterfly world" for a while with my grandma's party and all. My son' preschool class recently studied butterflies, even grew some from caterpillars (something I plan on doing here after we get back from vacation later this Spring). I had seen this example of an edible butterfly cycle. I decided that we would try it in our house for an interesting snack. I look forward to trying some of her stuff with the Very Hungry Caterpillar as well. We drew the four basic stages on a plate as my son told me about each in detail. It was his job to put everything in the right category. He's a pretty good teacher!

We used marshmallows for the eggs, gummy worms for caterpillars, tootsie rolls for the chrysalis and fancy crackers for the butterfly.

Very proud of his work (probably more excited to eat it than anything)!

Project: Butterfly Cupcakes

This past weekend, we celebrated my grandma's 85th birthday. She decided she wanted to have a party so she could see her friends and celebrate this occasion. Planning for the event started back in January. My mom and aunt were in charge of getting everything organized. I am known as the crafty one of the bunch....the only granddaughter. My mom and I did a lot of the buying of decorating supplies and my mom did a great job organizing and packing everything so nothing would be left behind (we had to take everything from Tennessee to Indiana). My main contribution to the party was the cupcake. Mom found this idea with butterfly wings and we proceeded from there. This is how our cupcakes came together:

We used chocolate to pipe the wings of each butterfly. We planned on over 100 cupcakes, so we had well over  200 little wings (I anticipated breakage on the journey from Tennessee). I found a butterfly template that we used for all the little wings.

After the outline of the wing set, we proceeded to fill the inside with colored chocolate.

Butterflies of all colors could be found on my kitchen and dining room tables.

I was in charge of all the cupcake baking. I started early on Thursday morning and baked 120 cupcakes (all before 8:30 AM I might add).

Saturday morning in Indiana. I iced all the cupcakes preparing them for our little butterfly wings.

Here's the final product.

I just love the cupcake stand that my aunt found to display the cupcakes on the main table. I'm VERY EXCITED that I'm the new owner of said cupcake display. Happy Birthday to me :-)

 I'm so happy with the way they turned out. We had many, many compliments on them!

Our Little Urban Garden, Part 3

Dateline: March 26

Something is going right...we have three little sprouts. Granted, I can't tell you which pepper is which. I failed to mention previously that my four year old threw a bit of a tantrum the night the seeds were planted and some of the seeds were displaced from their little holes. It's going to be one HUGE surprise to see what actually took off and what didn't!

Dateline: April 4

Wow, these little guys are doing tremendously well in their little container world. Chris says we have about a 70% success rate so far. I'm not sure what stage we actually put these in the ground outside. I guess I should start asking those kind of questions and be well informed!

Our Little Urban Garden, Part 2

Dateline: March 15, 2012

Time to start some seeds and see if we can make them grow to something 

we can eat in the coming months.

My oldest had to get on the action and help daddy plant the seeds.
He's more anxious about this garden than anyone I think!

Putting the seeds in the beginning soil thingy (I guess I should actually know what it is called
before I put it up here for all to see how little I really know about gardening).

The one slight mishap of the initial planting was the fact that the soil pellets (for lack of the right term)
should have been watered BEFORE the seeds were placed. Lesson learned. Our hopes of anything
actually sprouting are diminishing quickly.

We are *hoping* to grow all kinds of wonderful peppers.

Stay tuned to see if anything actually sprouted or not....