A Visit to the Park

We visited the local park today. Garden Girl rode her bike and Garden Boy pushed 'Blue Baby' in his pink pushchair (its OK that its pink because it has snails on it). On the way we admired people's gardens. We do this alot. Because we only really grow herbs and vegetables there isn't a lot of colour in our garden, so Garden Girl loves to look at all the colourful flowers we see when we walk about the neighbourhood. While she absolutely loves growing vegetables I know she harbours a wish for pretty things in our garden. This is something we will have to work on. But I have to admit to having very poor knowledge of flowering plants. My experience stretches as far as pansies and nasturtians and the odd rose. I am unable to tell her the names of pretty much all the flowers we see and yet she looks to me for the information. I plan to start taking pictures then identifying them with her on the internet.

She really enjoyed identifying some of the fruits, berries and nuts we discovered in a local park today, looking for similarities in the pictures. We have visited this park numerous times but today was the first day we really looked to see what was there and we found

• apple (a mix)

• hazel

• elder

• blackberry (sorry picture didn't turn out) and,
• damson

We will be heading out for a forage next weekend if the weather co-operates!

PS. Thank you to everyone who gave suggestions on how to use dandelions. We tried the leaves out tonight in a stir fry and they were enjoyed by everyone, apart from Garden Boy. They have a very strong flavour which complimented the pork extremely well. We will definately cook this again and try the leaves out in other cooked dishes, although I am less certain of how they will taste in a salad. I think we will give it a go in a tuna salad with a squeeze of lemon, as I think the tuna and lemon will balance well with the flavour. Thats for later in the week though.