Arbor Day

April 26, 2014 at 8:46 pm (Education, Events) (Arbor Day, baking, dewberries, Earth Day, half price books, homeschooling, Mercer Arboretum, muffins, nature, Recipes, seeds, woods)

Arbor Day P1010768 was yesterday. It’s always a nice ending to all the Earth Day celebrations… recycling, going green, celebrating the earth, and then – oh yes, plant a tree.

Of course we had to celebrate in the woods. So we took to the trails as usual and found our way to a lake. It was pretty fun teaching the kiddo to read a map – she’s already had a lot of exposure via The Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library book about maps. Putting it into action was a little bit more work than listening to me read clever poetry though.

We found the lake, a dock, and a pavilion. The kiddo painted and ate snacks, played with her homeschool buddy, and helped me pick dewberries. (Of course, little girls get distracted by pretty purple flowers. There were a lot of pretty purple flowers.)

For those who aren’t from the area: dewberries are basically blackberries. They look the same, taste the same, everything is about the same, they just grow on a vine-like plant (‘small trailing bramble’) that usually stays closer to the ground rather than the larger bush where you’d find blackberries. They’re of the same genus of plant – Rubus – and taste great raw, cooked, or baked into pies or muffins.

Which is exactly what we did.

Dewberry Muffins

2 cups flour

3/4 cup sugar

2 tsp. baking powder

1/4 tsp. salt

1 egg

3/4 cup milk

1/4 cup vegetable oil

1/4 cup vanilla extract

1 tsp. lemon extract

1 tsp. ground clove

1 quart freshly picked dewberries

Mix all ingredients well. Pour into muffin pans, bake for 30 minutes with the oven on 350.

If you can’t plant a tree, then plant any seeds you get your hands on. Seeds are important.

So, after all the fun and excitement of yesterday, today we stayed indoors. At Half Price Books…

We attended/ hosted another Half Price Books Humble event today. It was seed driven and sponsored by the Mercer Arboretum volunteers. Information about the Arboretum was shared with all the HPB customers, kids were given an opportunity to plant their own seed in little cups and take it home, and packets of free seeds were handed out.