Dinosaurs in the park

Last weekend our city was visited by Erth's Dinosaur petting zoo, it had traveled all the way from Australia, so we really couldn't miss the chance to see it especially not with all the little dinosaur experts in our family. It was amazing, so glad we took the time to go. The park was packed as thousands of people came to see the show.

This was my son's favourite, a Australovenator. It got a little worrying for a time when the keepers stated he was hungry and the audience was made of meat!

As you can see he was a little anxious as the dinosaur was hungry and seemed very eager to eat the audience.

He was fed and all was well again, all this didn't worry my daughter at all, she was very eager to get selected to go on stage and put her head inside it's mouth but I think she was too small to be chosen.

My daughter liked the little ones best, and enjoyed her face to face encounter with this laellynasaura. Erth has a website if you would like to see some of the things we saw you can see it here. If you get the chance to go along and see the show my children would highly recommend it.

Regrowing Celery

As a home educating family, we usually have many experiments on the go at any one time and I am really excited to show you this one of mine. I am a huge fan of raw food especially salad and we also love to grow our own food. Having recently read many articles about regrowing celery from the stub part that is usually thrown away, I decided to give it a try.... lured by the thought of free food. Each week I cut the bottom off the celery and put it in a bowl of water.

Some people just kept it in water for one night then planted it in the garden but we were curious to see the new growth and growing celery in England is a bit of a challenge, from what I have read, as it is not at all frost hardy and shouldn't be planted out until May or June. As you can see the celery just continued to grow.

In the photograph above I have arranged the celery in age order so you can clearly see the growth, there is about a week or two between each stump. You can see on the second plant from the left a new root is forming at the base.

The new celery plant continues to grow from the center, some of the outside stalk does die back but is easy to peel off to reveal your new plant.

These are the two largest celery plants now, I have had them potted up for a few weeks, as it is still too early to plant out. The plants have really taken off since they were put into compost, as you can see, they have had a lot of new growth and the roots are starting to come out of the bottom of the pots. I have been getting them used to the outside temperature on nice days to harden them up ready for planting out soon.

I now have about six new celery plants, grown free from the pieces we normally throw away, we are really looking forward to harvest time as this has been quite an exciting project for the children to see. Why not have a go yourself...