Child's Garden "Room"

"Garden rooms" are all the rage in city lots, suburban yards and my rural back yard too. We like to make destination spots, complete with reading nooks on teak benches and focal points in burbling fountains. But before I ever read a garden magazine or took a tour of Butchart Gardens with my book club, my mom taught me how to make a room of my own in the great outdoors.

You can make this fun hiding spot for your children this summer.

You will need:

Two or three sampler packets of sunflower seeds. I like to mix it up: Mammoth Russian for the classic eight- to 10-foot-tall yellow sunflower with a brown-black center, closely alternated with Evening Sun for variations in russet, red, brown and yellow, also eight to 10 feet tall. The height range should be close if you mix up the varieties.

Two or three sampler packets of annual morning glory vines. Go crazy with color if you want, but blue is our favorite.

A plot of dirt that's tilled or weeded and loosened with a rake. If you want to use a grassy area, that'll work, as long as you don't mow it once the seedlings start coming up!

Mark out a square, rectangle or other shape (creativity counts!). Let your little ones help with the shape.

Next divide up your seeds so you have an equal number of each type and variety of seed for each "wall" of the room.

Time to plant!

Alternate varieties if you have more than one. The Mammoth Russian is a single-stalk variety, and the Evening Sun has multiple stalks, so this helps fill in the lower areas of the "walls."

Now, the only tricky part of this whole procedure is to make sure that you plant them close enough together to form a wall, but not so close that they don't get big and strong.

We have found that four to five inches apart works pretty well.

Important! In each hole or spot in the row that you plant a sunflower seed, place two morning glory seeds in that same spot. Right alongside.

Check your children's placement of seeds... this will be vital to the roof of the house.

After all the seeds are lined up in the shape of your walls, make sure you left a hole on at least one side for a door!

Finally, cover the seeds with soil, water well, and watch them grow.

As the morning glory vines start, twine them up the stalk of their sunflower pals. After about six weeks you should be able to string a network of twine between the sunflower heads.

The morning glories will twine along the string ceiling and form a beautiful blue canopy for the sunflower house.

I will post pictures of my children's sunflower room as soon as the seedlings poke their heads up.

Hope you have fun with this project. And tell us your kid gardening tips!

You're not alone, country girl!

So if nobody else has noticed, being a farm girl or country girl or pioneer woman just isn't the same as it used to be. Back in the day, socializing came about on Sunday afternoons and during the seasonal barn building and hoe down events. Well for us, things have definitely changed for the better. We have things like - blogs, forums, chat rooms and, dare I say it, Instant Messenger to keep us from going insane. These are also very helpful tools for keeping the country girl "in the know".

A couple of my favorite knowledge base forums have proved to be quite valuable to me over the last year or so. It has been almost two years since I was fired from my rootin' tootin' job as a financial services consultant and I truly believe it was God kickin' me in the patootey and putting me back in my place. That place is on the home front with the kids and the critters and the roasted chicken in the oven. Seriously, I have a chicken in the oven. It's a miracle. I think a press conference is in order for this shocking news. (And no, it's not one of my beloved hens!)

But really - when I decided I wanted chickens in my backyard again, where else would one go but BackyardChickens.com? Talk about a plethora of advice! Need pictures of breeds? Need to know what kind of chick you got mailed to you? When do your chicks no longer need a heat lamp? Does your chicken have a rectal protrusion real emergency that you need advice about NOW? It's ALL on there. And seriously people, I have never found a forum with such a nice, down to earth group of people. Ever. They are fantastic. Intelligent. HILARIOUSLY funny - (especially on April 1, 2008!). And real.

Nifty, the super neato administrator for the BYC forum, has also started up a sister site that I have visited a lot recently. TheEasyGarden.com is a nice complement to BYC because we all know that people who have chickens, have a tendency to act like chickens and scratch in the dirt from time to time. TheEasyGarden forum is growing like a weed (pun certainly intended) and has been very helpful to me when I didn't have a clue how to plant my potatoes or when to prune my plum tree. I also found out we have some weeds that I'll probably never get rid of, but at least I don't feel like I'm alone in the battle of ME vs. the THISTLE!

If you have any other VERY helpful websites that this country girl can review, just give me a holler. You know I have all sorts of time to sit and have therapy blog now that my garden is in place!

Cup full of cheer.....

Just a little something to help with the mid-week slump.............Hope this bit of farm cheer does the trick.