kindergardens - week 17 {playing with our food}

It's been a quiet week in the garden...the calm before the storm.  We are gearing up for SALSA!!  Hopefully we will have enough tomatoes ripe at the same time to make a batch in the next week or two.  We certainly have onions and peppers a-plenty!

This week we sacrificed some of our veggies for the sake of art, inspired by this post.  Kiddo and I went out and picked a variety of vegetables and used them as stamps.

We used a carrot, onion, tomato, gourd, baby pumpkin, bell pepper and a rhubarb stalk.  Most of them I just sliced in half.  For the onion, I left one half intact and separated the other half into individual rings.  For the carrot, we also cut the top off and used it as a paint brush: 

We also picked a sunflower, a daisy, and a mushroom we found growing in the grass nearby.

Here's what the sunflower looked like when I got some of the extra paint off:

mushroom (a little tricky, as it was so fragile):

Kiddo quickly grew tired of paper and decided to paint the grass instead.  Hooray for nontoxic, washable crayola paint!

If I were doing it again, I would have supplied paint brushes to brush the paint onto the veggies.  Instead, we dipped them into puddles of paint, and they collected so much paint that we didn't have much of the texture of the veggies showing through.  We mostly just got large round paint blobs.  I think maybe if we brushed the paint on, we could have controlled the amount of paint better.  We still had fun, though!

This week we have also been trying to enjoy our gourd vine tunnel while we still can - the vines are quickly wilting away.  Insert sad face here.  The gourds are really growing despite the vines being seriously ill - it is fun to walk through the ones dangling in the tunnel.  Kiddo likes to bat at them and make them swing back and forth.

The pole beans are climbing their way up, so there is hope we will have a tunnel for a few more weeks yet, even after the gourd vines have met their demise.

Update:  I just went out this evening to check on things, and we've got beans!!

We also have one teeny tiny purple bean, but it was too dark in that part of the yard to snap a pic.

And I'll also add a gratuitous sunflower pic, since I'm in love.  I'm thinking a whole field of these babies would be fun next year...if only I had a field to plant them in!

We have been having such a ball participating in the kindergarden contest this summer.  Thanks, Kim, for dreaming up such a marvelous idea and letting us be a part of it!