It’s peak summer and B and I are finding an abundance of play opportunities. We pick blackberries; carve and sort apples; gather wildflowers; harvest lavender and make perfume; find things that smell nice and make stuff with them; find strange fruits and pull them open to see what’s inside; visit Vale Pick Your Own; look for an acorn fidget and have a lot of fun peeling grass seeds off the stalks…

177 – Pulling the seeds off

Monday 7 July.  Sunny. 22°C

B’s dragging me to the local park to play with the grass. Her friend ‘F’ has shown her how you can get a bit of grass, loop it round another bit of grass and yank it up to pull all the seeds off in one go. It’s definitely a good challenge activity.

Once we start we just keep going. The reeds have fantastic long grasses with lots of seeds so we start there. Then B finds other seeds everywhere – fluffy white ones, wheat, normal grass ones… when we get home we find more in the garden (old skull cap seeds). We alternate using grass to pull them off and just using our fingers. We haven’t yet found a use for the seeds… that’s for another day!

176 – Picking wildflowers

Tuesday 8 July. Sunny 24°C

We’re dog walking and I want some flowers. I’m aware that you need to be careful picking wildflowers. We make sure we’re not picking anything that looks rare or there aren’t lots off. Basic rule, only take a bit.

It’s fun looking over the options and selecting good ones. When we get home we put them in a vase and Primrose thinks they’re marvellous… then she destroys the buttercups.

175 – Carving fallen apples and baby pears

Wednesday 9 July.  Sunny. 25°C

Next door’s apple tree has dropped some baby apples in the garden. They’re definitely not big enough to eat but we wonder if we can carve them. I’ve been wanting to get B carving but I’m a bit wary of wood and sharp knives. These are soft and easy to cut.

We make a 175 and then some faces… then we run out of apples so we pick a few baby pears from the pear tree and try it on those. If you slice the bottom off they stand up.

174 – Picking blackberries

Thursday 10 July.  Sunny. 28°C

They’re ready! We both love blackberries. Every year B gets completely blackberry focused for several weeks – till she over eats them and then refuses to go near them for the rest of the summer. Behind our house there are lots of bushes. We’ve been watching them for weeks and now there are quite a few soft, squishy yummy black ones ready.

B grabs a pot. “Ok. We’re going to fill this and then come in.”

We wonder if we’ll pick 174 but fail to count them. We agree we won’t eat any… but we do. I bring a little stool with me to get to the high up ones. Obviously we also get pricked. We avoid nettles and spiders though. B likes to eat the red ones which worries me.

We bring them in, wash them and B makes some into a smoothie. I intend to stew them but it’s too hot. There’s lots of time to do it all again many times before the winter arrives. I remember after that we took the litter picker with us last year to pull the branches down… will try this next time.

169 – Harvesting lavender and making perfume

Wednesday 16 July. Cloudy. 22°C

Continuing the picking things theme, we’re exploring the lavender. There’s a few bushes in the garden. They’re filled with bees, which makes B squeal (ironically). We notice that the lavender has honey bees while the big flower next door has bumble bees. Both seem very happy and we pick the lavender with care!

We put some in a vase and then break some bits up and put it in a bowl. After a bit of googling we find a stick to act as a pestle and pound it a bit. Then we put it in a bottle and pour water on top to make perfume. The website suggests then straining it and adding alcohol. We don’t get that far this time but we have fun and there’s lots left to try other things with later. I suspect we’ll extract the flowers from the vase at some point, hang them upside down and dry them.

167 – Finding plants that smell nice

Friday 18 July. Cloudy. 20°C

B is exploring the garden with new interest after the insect spotting challenge. She’s suddenly interested in everything.

B: ‘What’s that?’

Me: ‘I don’t know. I think it’s some sort of herb because it smells nice but the rabbits don’t like it so it’s grown loads’.

B: ‘Are there other things that smell?’

She’s off. I’ve been trying to get her interested in smelling stuff for weeks – maybe the winds in the right direction. I point her towards the lavender and the mint and she starts pulling leaves off random plants and smelling that too. She comes back with a ‘guess the plant’ smell game…

I get the first three… I don’t get ‘fuchsia’ or ‘the darker one next to it that might be St John’s Wort’… She swears they smell – I’m not convinced but happy she’s interested. She’s then busy making something which involves a perfume bottle, a sieve and some scissors.

164 – Investigating strange fruit

Monday 21 July. Cloudy. 21°C

We’re out in an unfamiliar park and notice weird round green fruits on the ground. We’re pretty sure they’re not apples. B tries out the google chrome photo recognition thing and it comes up with… WALNUTS!? We don’t believe it so we try the Picture This app instead… Still walnuts. We try and open them to see but they’re impenetrable (though filled with juice which turns our fingernails black). We take them home to see what kitchen knives can achieve. We also notice that there ARE things a bit like walnuts on the ground… so maybe it’s true.

Then we start noticing other weird fruit. B uses the phone to identify a London plane tree (prickly balls) and a sweet chestnut (long green hairy round things). To top it off we find some cobnuts in a greengrocers.

At home, we dig out a kitchen knife and have a go at the walnut. It’s really juicy on the outside… bit like a peach but less fruit and more stone… but you can’t break the stone with the knife. I stop B trying – envisaging bloody accidents. We scrape it enough that we can see a walnut shape outline beneath the green.

We don’t need the knife for the others. She has a lot of fun pulling the prickly/hairy things apart and finding the little stones at the source. Then she peels the cobnuts… though they’re too hard to bite or cut so, given the lack of a nutcracker which would have been useful, we give up.

161 – Pick Your Own strawberries & wildflowers

Thursday 24 July. Mixed. 22°C

We’re going professional in our picking today with a visit to Vale Pick Your Own. Their raspberries are finished sadly (seriously yummy) but they still have strawberries. They warn the wildflower season has been a bit rubbish with so little rain so they’ve cut their prices. We’ve brought our own pots and a friend for B and are ready!

I’m worried we’ll be too late for strawberries too but there’s loads and B and friend are off. There’s something irresistible about picking fruit. Hard to stop. We find some funny shaped ones. The girls are looking for big ones. I want ones that are perfectly ripe and am trying not to get too many. Last year we over did it and some went off before we could eat them.

We deliver the paid for strawberries to the car and head out to explore the wildflowers. It’s really not bad at all – not as much variety as last year – but they’re still there if you look. The girls are searching for the perfect flowers and get lots of beautiful poppies (which disintegrate on touch), daisies and cornflowers which they store carefully in their brown paper bags. To finish they each get two sunflowers.

It’s a lovely day, extended by the process of getting home, getting the flowers in water carefully and picking up the poppy petals! B and I think we might press them in a day or two…

153 – Harvesting apples…

Friday 1 August. Cloudy 21°C

The neighbours apple tree is heavily loaded with apples which have started rolling off our roof and all over the garden. She’s asked us to pick the ones on our side. The neighbour opposite has loads too. The bunnies are happy but the garden’s getting a bit smelly. Time for action.

We start with the fallen ones – most aren’t edible by us. We did them out of the pond, out from under bushes and ignore the ones in the corner we can’t get to. We sort into ‘ok for the bunnies’ and ‘compost’ and put in different buckets and trays accordingly. Then we get the ladder out and climb up onto the roof. The sundial‘s still there! We have other things to look at.

There’s a thing where you pull one apple off and three others roll over the roof and down into the garden (and the ‘for rabbits’ pile). We learn to pull two off at a time. A lot are eaten already on the tree but we get a ‘perfect’ tray and ‘maybe a hole and some marks’ tray for stewing…

I don’t think we need to buy apples for a while.

152 – Looking for an acorn fidget

Saturday 2 August. Cloudy 21°C

The next day and we have friends visiting. We head out to find a challenge to do. As we head through the park I remember seeing lots of tiny acorns and the girls are on it. We do remember it’s 152 but it turns into 153 somewhere along the way. We correct later.

Last year, around this time, I picked up a tiny acorn in its little cup and put it absentmindedly in my pocket. Finding it a month or so later, it had dried and wiggled very satisfyingly in it’s case – without ever coming out. It became my own personal fidget. B was jealous. This year I’m challenging her and F to find their own. After making the number we each keep a few in our pockets… to see what happens. We keep a few cases too – in case any fairies come to tea.