Homeschool Fiction

Once again, it’s time to harvest prickly pear fruit.  Here are a few photographs of my daughters enjoying picking this year’s harvest. We’re going to have a big crop this year (over the next two or so weeks), so if there is anyone local interested in picking some, please contact me.

All of theses photos were taken on my land in southern Arizona.

These were taken in the Sonoran Desert, Sahuarita, Arizona, in April 2009.

Today’s sunrise inspired me to take a few photographs.  Here is a sampling (click here for the first set from last year).

Due to popular demand from my “Enchilada Casserole” post, here is my Vegan-Friendly Prickly Pear Barbeque Sauce recipe. Once I realized that we were going to be able to get a large harvest of prickly pear fruit this past summer, I started reading up on various things people do with prickly pear fruit. [...]

My 12 year old daughter has come up with some of the most interesting Halloween costumes over the years. Since she has been old enough to decide her own costumes, she’s been: a black cat (twice), Laa-Laa (from Teletubbies), Madeline, a spotted bat, a computer (with working parts), a Borg, and a scarecrow. [...]

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is in southern Arizona, right on the U.S./Mexico border. My family and I have been wanting to go there for a while and we recently had the opportunity. What surprised us the most was how few people we saw (only one other vehicle on the 22 mile loop). [...]

Here is the last of Zoë’s series of Haiku poems for the summer of 2008. Certainly she’ll write more later.
Click here for PART ONE and here for PART TWO.
Tortoise
Turtle, terrapin
It is neither one of those
The desert tortoise

Coyote

Howls out my window
Even though they’re far away
They seem very close

Barrel Cactus

Sunset red flower
Short and [...]

Prickly Pear Jelly
I haven’t had the greatest luck in the world preparing jelly, so here is my “What to do when the recipes don’t work” directions.
Prepare syrup as pectin package indicates. Basically you need a lot of sugar, the fruit itself, and pectin. With this made, you supposedly just need [...]