The Year of the Squash

The squash is coming in wonderfully! Seems like this is the bounty from that first round of females I hand polinated. Here's the take from Tuesday night.

Yesterday I got home and harvested this:

The rest of the females on there are rotting down so I suppose they didn't get polinated well. Hopefully the bees will show up soon. I just can't hand polinate during the week which is cutting in to my squash bounty.



I'm having my first major bout with bugs. The cucumber beetles are everywhere and no so are the squash bugs and flea beetles. I found today that the flea beetles have gotten by cucumbers badly. I just can't go out to the garden multiple times a day to pick bugs while school is in session. Ah, the pros and cons of starting early.



Speaking of school: This was a testing week and there was a three hour block of time where the seniors didn't have testing, so I got the responsibility of finding them something to do. All 459 of them. My idea for a carnival/picnic was shot down as not being educational, so instead I organized 19 cooperative learning/lateral thinking/team building activities (see how I spun this? Educational field day!) We had games with rope, PVC pipe, marbles, wooden dowels, blindfolds and rubber chickens. Who doesn't love a rubber chicken?



It was FANTASTIC! Kids and teachers both had a blast and about half of the kids stayed home which suited our purposes just fine. As luck would have it, testing ran long and we ran out of stations. We ran for some trash bags and played Cattle Call. Everyone paired up and chose an animal based on an assigned letter and we separated them to opposite endzones of the field. The left side all had to yell their animal's name while the right side yelled the sound their animal made. Blindfolded - they had to find each other.



The innitial start was fantastic with the shreaking/zombie walking kids all walking towards the center of the field. A teacher took this film when it was about half over.

HA! Play it again. Hear the kid going "Duh, duh, duhn, duh" at the very start? His partner was yelling "SHARK!" He was yelling the music to Jaws...however I don't believe he got it quite right.

More fun was never had by anyone.

The morning comes early. Who's my partner!? I'll yell "FROG!" Your turn! ;)