Gardening Home School Style

So today begins our adventure into the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Although most historians believe that they were probably terraced and not actually hanging we'll be doing hanging gardens. This is part of our summer schooling program. We'll be able to get a lot of things in with this one project: reading, math, science, social studies (or History), writing, home economics, art and probably some other things if I think about it a bit more. I love being able to put everything together, it's more realistic. After all when you want to know information about something it usually isn't separate from other things. We don't research about gardens just because, usually it's to benefit our lives in some way (help provide food for our tables, cut costs, etc). So we used some of the money we got from our tax return to get both the girls their own hanging garden. Each will be hanging their own choice of two tomato plants and two cucumbers. Then the tops will be up to them. I'm doing my own garden in the back using the square foot gardening method that my sister-in-law introduced me to. I was lucky enough to see the one she had in Virgina and was fascinated by it. Now I'm actually going to be able to try one myself this year finally. Okay so I know that I'm trying to share the thrifty side of things that we do. We did save some money on the gardens by getting them at our local Sams for $50.00. We are also saving the recipts since our accountant said that we can claim many things on our taxes for education costs. I'm not sure what all we can claim but I'm keeping all the receipts of everything we spend on the girls schooling with a short note on the back of what it was used for. We'll see how much we get back when we file next year. This year we were able to claim a little over $600 on hubby's college expenses. Hopefully later today I'll be able to figure out how to post pictures on here for everyone to see!

Until then.........