Go on a fantasic voyage to discover all kinds of unbelievable, almost magical dramas playing out in--yep--your very own backyard! A gardening family and a pair of chickens bring you on an interesting and fun journey in this informative book. Click here to read my full review.
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Blog: Young Adult (& Kid's) Books Central (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: vegetables, spiders, gardens, compost, composting, beetles, pests, canning, seedlings, photosynthesis, food chain, chicken coop, chicken run, planting seeds, food webs, food web, chickens, seeds, gardening, insects, Add a tag
Blog: The Children's Book Review (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Ashley Wolff, Compost, Ages Four to Eight: Books for pre-school to second grade, Picture Book - Wordless, Environment & Ecology: Earth conscience, Mary McKenna Siddals, Add a tag
By Bianca Schulze, The Children’s Book Review
Published: April 12, 2011
By Mary McKenna Siddals (Author), Ashley Wolff (Illustrator)
Reading level: Ages 4-7
Hardcover: 40 pages
Publisher: Tricycle Press; 1 edition (March 23, 2010)
Source: Publisher
Compost Stew: An A to Z Recipe for the Earth uses a clever and entertaining rhyme that, just as the title suggests, gives a great recipe for making compost. All of the ingredients are familiar household products, such as vegetable trimmings, coffee grounds, and oatmeal. At the back of the book the “Chef’s Note” can be found—it’s another witty rhyme all of its own and teaches readers what shouldn’t go in compost. The illustrations, which are rendered in gouache and collage, compliment the tone of the recipe with the use of more familiar recyclable materials.
About the Author: Mary McKenna Siddals is the author of several picture books for the very young, including Millions of Snowflakes. In addition, she has written dozens of children’s stories, articles, poems, and activities appearing in a variety of magazines. A former teacher, she lives in British Columbia, Canada, where she enjoys tending to her own batch of Compost Stew. Learn more about Mary at www.siddals.com.
About the Illustrator: Ashley Wolff is the author and/or illustrator of more than sixty children’s books, including Baby Beluga; I Love My Mommy Because; I Love My Daddy Because; Mama’s Milk; Stella and Roy Go Camping; I Call My Grandma Nana; I Call My Grandpa Papa; When Lucy Goes Ou
Add a CommentBlog: Saints and Spinners (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: compost, diet of worms, vermiculture, Add a tag
For the purposes of Earth Day (which really should be every day), I am going to exploit some family history:
My mom was a fan of compost long before compost cones made the whole setup easier. The little compost container by the side of the sink was a regular fixture in each of our successive homes. A homemade structure out in the back yard would contain all of our leftover fruit and vegetable peels. However, when I was in graduate school, my mom ordered a worm bin and put it in the basement.
The first day that the worm bin resided in the basement, my mom called the worm bin hotline to ask why the worms were looking so peaked and tired out. "They have jet lag," the customer service representative explained.
My mom asked, "Do they have personalities?"
The representative paused, and then said, "They have a collective personality."
Soon after, the worms staged their first jailbreak. Mom got them back into the bin, but after that, my brothers and I refused to go near it. My mom tried to convince my brothers and me that the worms were actually good tenants. We said NOTHING DOING, and told her that we would continue to put fruit and veggie scraps into the compost container upstairs, but when it came to feeding the worms, she was on her own. Every time the worms broke free, mom would yell, "Worm alert! Worm alert!" and try to get us to help her round them up. We were stubbornly uncooperative. Years later, when the worms finally died, my mother wept over their carcasses.*
These days, vermiculture is quite fashionable. My daughter does not care for most animals, but is a fan of insects and earthworms. I might be persuaded to host a "wormery" for her sake, but not until all of the other household projects on our list have been completed. That's a pretty safe statement to write.
Happy Earth Day!
*Yes, okay, that is an exaggeration. Many thanks to my mom for letting me take creative license with this story.
Blog: Neil Gaiman (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Four Photos, a useful post, jars, cheesecloth, buckets, The Graveyard Book, bees, Four Photos, honey, a useful post, jars, cheesecloth, buckets, honey, Add a tag
Those of you who have been following the saga of The Bees over at the birdchick blog (http://www.birdchick.com/labels/beekeeping.html) will know that of the two hives we started out with, which we called Olga and Kitty, Olga has thrived, while Kitty did so well that she swarmed in late summer and took off to see the world. We got a new queen, but the remaining bees in Kitty never got her population back up in time for winter.
Which meant that when it got really cold this year, Olga had enough bees to keep the hive warm and Kitty simply didn't. I went out in January and noticed that the snow had melted around Olga, she was removing her dead and, on warm days, bees were nipping out and pooping yellow in the snow, whereas Kitty was just a green box with nothing going on.
So I did what anyone would do. I sent a few thousand dead bees to Lisa Snellings, to make into art.
A couple of days ago I noticed that someone -- probably a raccoon -- had tried to get in to Kitty, and clean out the honey, which meant it was time to do something. I called Sharon, who was down with hellflu, and got the greenlight from her.
Lorraine and I moved the empty kitty hive into the garage.
And then I had to decide what to do with the honey in Kitty. I went onto the Internet to find out if there was anything I could do that didn't involve buying centrifugal honey extractors, and learned that if it was honey I wanted, a bucket and some cheesecloth would do just fine...
So I mashed up the leftover comb and honey into a bucket, tipped the resulting scary-looking gloop into the cheesecloth at the top of another bucket...
Then nipped out to the garage every three or four hours to add more gloop as the honey trickled through the cheescloth into the bottom bucket.
And this morning Lorraine came over and we took the cheesecloth off bucket #1 and poured the honey into jars. Astonishingly, the cheesecloth had done its job, and we had wax and crud on the outside of the bucket and clear honey on the inside.
There's probably the same amount again still in the garage right now trickling through the cheesecloth into buckets.
The honey is wonderful. It tastes like wildflowers and spring. I'd rather have Kitty out there filled with bees (although the Kitty hive that swarmed is undoubtedly fine, in a hollow tree somewhere), but the honey's good too.
...
The Graveyard Book is pretty much ready to be copy-edited now. I was scared that my editors in the UK and the US would point out somewhere I'd messed up that would need a whole new chapter (much as Sarah Odedina at Bloomsbury did when she read Coraline in manuscript and said, "It needs a chapter where she confronts the Other Father, who in what you've given me just goes offstage and stays off," and I said "oh Bugger it does, doesn't it?" and had to go and write it. I mean, I knew about the scene in the cellar. I just thought I could get away with not having written it.).
But nothing like that happened. Sarah's biggest concern was a scene where a fifteen-year old girl accepts a ride from a stranger (obviously, she shouldn't have, but Sarah wanted it to be convincing that she did) and Elise only had small points -- the biggest change was that she wanted a sentence removed that spelled out how ghouls got their names, which I'd put in slightly under protest because a few people had been confused as to whether the small, leathery corpse-eaters were the real Duke of Westminster, 35th President of the United States, Bishop of Bath and Wells, or not, and I was happy to see it go away again.
I got an email today from Diana Wynne Jones saying "It is FABULOUS, WONDERFUL, TRIFFIC. One of your best! I love it," which is better than gold and rubies (and if Diana doesn't like something, she tells me). Jon Levin at CAA, my long-suffering movie agent, is starting to fend off the phone calls as people call him wanting to see it, and we have to decide who we're showing it to, which is a good problem to have.
Everything's sort of accelerated right now. The book comes out in six months (30 Sept in the US, a month later in the UK), and there's not really much time for the normal routes of book promotion.
I'll see if we can get a countdown to publication date timer for the front page of the website. I don't think I've had one of those since American Gods.
I am actually rather fond of my own worms...prescious litle composters that they are. So my sympathies are with your mother! Although I am not quite sure I would want them inside.
Have you and Lucia ever read Owly? It is a lovely wordless graphic novel about an Owl and his little Worm buddy.
And I also have always liked Richard Scary's Lowly Worm very much.
I think I would have cried if they'd died. We wanted to do this years ago, but we never owned a house with a yard/garden (our townhouse had a teensy yard, but we thought we'd wait for our real "someday" house.)
...still thinking SOMEDAY!
And HAH! Just for saying that, the Universe is now going to make sure all of your other household tasks get finished up so you can have WORMS!!!
Charlotte: I just placed a library request for Owly. Thanks! And I was always a fan of Lowly Worm, too, and worms in the garden. It was just too much fun to give my poor mom a hard time, plus I didn't want to tread on any worms during their jailbreaks.
Tanita: I hope the Universe does just that. There are blinds to be replaced, a metal railing sunk into concrete that somehow got broken prior to our acquisition of the house and is currently bound by duct tape, a bathroom that still needs to be finished (baseboards), plus we need to build shelves. Also, I want big things bolted to the wall because we're in earthquake territory. I suppose it's time to repaint the walls, too, and varnish the floor where there's been too much friction. A worm bin is just a stone's throw away!
I think you need worms. I don't think I could handle it, but it sounds like you can.
Having said that, we finally got a compost bin. But it's OUTSIDE of the house.
Your mom is so cool. I'm going to learn to compost this summer.
I agree with you and your brothers. Your mother wanted worms in our house. I told her I would feed them to the birds.
Richard
I love the story about the worms but have my own rules when it comes to sharing the planet with other species. Basically, they stay outside the house! I suppose I am lucky to be in a position to have this rule. I have a garden and feed the birds every day. I am friends with the cat up the road (although he doesn't count me as one of his pride yet. You know how choosy cats are!) and I pat my customers' dogs.
However, when I went to have some of the chocolate cake my daughter had made for us the other day, and, upon opening the tin I found that some ants had made it their home in it then, I am afraid, I became extremely territorial and intolerant. (Or should that be intolerAnt?) The whole lot went straight into the recycling bin from where, I guess, the ants will meet a fiery end.
Ants at the end of the garden, fine, they make a good snack for the Woodpecker. Ants in the chocolate cake - WAR!!
This would make a fun picture book! (Happy Earth Day and Happy Spring!)