We have a lot of stuff growing here right now.

Ellery told our friend at the library the other day that we now have 19 pets. I felt it important to clarify that 12 of those are worms and caterpillars. Four more are fish.

So I wanted to spend the first part of this week catching you up on some of the stuff we are growing here.

And today I’d like to talk about our baskets. We started these a few days ago using wheat berries.

(To do this project at home you’ll also need a basket; some kind of thin plastic — cling wrap is an option, or an old bag, or anything else you can recycle; potting soil and a spray bottle filled with water.)

The berries need to be soaked for 24 hours before planting. On the day you begin your basket, line the bottom with a thin piece of plastic and fill about half-way up with potting soil. Then sprinkle the wheat berries on top.

(Depending on the ages of the kids, an adult might want to make sure that the berries form a nice, even layer).

Then spray the basket with water and cover with plastic to make a “greenhouse” for the first 24 hours.

After that, keep your wheatberry basket in the sun (outside is great, but when we started ours it was kind of cold so we kept the baskets near a window and gradually introduced them to the outdoors) and keep the soil pretty damp.

In about 10 days, you’ll have tall grass. You can use the basket for Easter (and use real grass instead of plastic grass), or as a spring basket (you could mix in a few flower seeds too), or you can cut the grass and blend it into a smoothie (it’s wheatgrass!), or, if you have a cat, your cat will love it.

We have two of those as well, by the way.

Number 19 is a dog, but he ate one of our eggshell gardens, so I am listing him last so he knows what all that ranting and arm waving was about last week.