Friday afternoons have turned into my favorite time of the week. This is the time that I get to spend with two of my younger grandchildren, Rowan (9) and Braxton (7). Jack picks them up from school and brings them to our house where we do “projects.”
While I work with one of the kids on the piano, the other kid takes Jack in hand and they do an activity. Part of my joy in all this is seeing Jack expanding his list of interests to include projects, though I know full well that his interest is really in being with his grandchildren.
When the piano lesson is over, we switch kids and do it all over again.
Last week, having run out of paint and glue, I decided that our weekly project should be gardening. I purchased two small planter boxes, potting soil, pansies and snapdragons and wrote out full instructions.
They had a blast. The kids were really into it and followed the instructions precisely and even Jack got his hands in the dirt.
I know that the plants would, at best, only put out 2 or 3 inches of roots throughout the season, so instead of trying to fill the entire box with potting soil, I used a “spacer” to take up room. After considering and discarding many ideas (bricks were too heavy, plastic peanuts were too messy and I didn’t have any plastic containers that I wanted to throw away) I came up with the idea of using an empty wine bottle. After the stress of election week, we had plenty of those around!
The kids put rocks in the bottom of the container for better drainage, then placed the wine bottle sideways and covered it with top soil (cheap!) placed their plants of choice on top of this, then filled in and around the plants with organic, moisture retentive potting soil (NOT cheap, but totally worth it).
The results were magnificent and hopefully they’ll remember to water so that the planter boxes will look good throughout the winter and will bloom profusely in spring.
But of course the end product was not the point of the afternoon. Instead, it was the joy of spending time with these precious children and my absolute delight in seeing Jack with dirt under his fingernails!!!