The Garden Dirt: Happy Summer!

Today is the first day of summer, and the longest day of the year. It is fitting that today was the first day Backyard University students could enjoy the season's first strawberries. Mathberries, if you're nerdy.

These came out of Mathberry Tower, but they didn't look this ready-to-eat when I picked them. I used to leave berries to ripen in the sun, all the way, until they were dark and sweet and ready, and...already invaded upon by some other critter! It never failed. I'd have my eye on a berry as it ripened, and as soon as I went to pick it, I'd find a hole full of pill bugs, already taking their share.

So, now I pick them when they're still a little greenish-white. Overall, the berry has to have a good reddish tone going on, but not more than that, or it emits the tantalizing smell of eat me to the tiny world of theiving arthro- and pseudo- pods that lie waiting in the shadows. I am no match for that dark army. They feast at night, when I am snoring. I am like a cartoon antagonist, bumbling to tuba music.

After picking, lightly brush away any dirt, leaves, etc. stuck to the berry, and set in a windowsill to ripen, turning every day. Do not wash them! Leaving the berries dry is important them getting ripe without rotting.

You'll know when it's ready to eat by the color, and even though sun-ripened all the way would be ideal, it still beats grocery store produce. Sometimes, we cut the tops off of them and freeze them, collecting them in a sealable bag in the freezer. This makes our little trickle of strawberries into an actual usable portion, good for making jam, syrup, or adding to pancake batter.

Have a long and lovely summer day!

Brain Storms: Mathberries

What do strawberries and math have in common? George loves them both. George is my third boy, and at the moment he is five. To you and me that means he's been alive for five years, but to George, it goes a little beyond that. He = 5.

I hesitate to attempt to explain what is going on in George's mind. From where I stand, it looks like math is the most authentic language he's encountered so far. His ability to use English is far behind his peers, but his ability to use numbers and their relationships is far beyond that of me, a big smart grown-up.

Here he is doing some geometry with his math instructor dad.

This is sort of like the stuff I was doing in the 9th grade. He likes order, patterns, and things that make sense. That's why, when I wondered to myself how to build a strawberry tower in the garden, I decided to make it mathy. I wanted George to see something special in it, even if it doesn't yet offer big red berries for him to add to his breakfast on a summer morning.

I give you, Mathberry Tower:


Looking at it from the top, you can't tell that each of those shapes, or polygons, are a different level, "stacked" up, like a real tower; a real, short, somewhat delicate, tower. Not only is it three polygons stacked on top of each other, it is a triangle, a square, and a pentagon: 3, 4, 5. I imagine George dancing around it when it's in bloom.

Then I got some burlap. I know! It's thrilling.

Burlap is a very mathy fabric. It, the berries, and a way to make a new strawberry planter out of burlap were swirling around in my foggy head one morning. If I made a sack, and cut holes, I'd be stuck with edging the holes, that would be unraveling maddeningly.
No, I needed real inspiration.

I needed a toilet paper tube.

See?

Ah,

and?

You get the idea? Well, even if you're not sure, don't worry. Burlap is forgiving, as long as you give yourself a lot of extra on the edges to fold over and iron. If you don't do that, you incur the wrath of burlap and it will unravel on you mightily, eating up all of your precious seam allowance! Run!!

Once the sides of the strip are sewn down, the whole thing might look a little like Deep-Fried Burlap, with ripples and curves. Let these little irregularities be your friend. They make the strip coil up on its own, and give you more power to sculpt it as you sew the spiral into place.

Here's Mae, adding tiny baby pinches of sand to the soil, to make it drain better. Fun tip! A storage box and a commitment to sweep soon afterward are all you need for your toddler to enjoy playing in the dirt in the house. Real talk? She could have frolicked in the stuff accumulating under our air hockey table, but this looks so much more Montessori.


I hope I've given George yet another way to appreciate our mathberries, because this bending and twisting of fabric to achieve a 3D shape is a very interesting breed of math called topology. As math instructors always say, "Math is everywhere." They also ask if you've turned in your homework, and when you're going to make up that quiz you missed, but that's not something I can plant in, so I'm moving on.

Now that you know about topology, you'll see it everywhere: in landscapes and windsocks, toilet paper rolls and dog collars.

Or maybe you'll just go buy some fresh fruit and count the days until June. And think up more stuff to do with burlap.