Backyard Craft – Butterfly Feeders

Editor’s Note: Good morning. We’ve got a fun craft for you this morning. But, it’s this afternoon that brings big news here at Our Big Earth.
It’s a deliciously detailed dish comes with a month’s worth of community goodness, family fun of the foodie kind and the chance to win nearly $3,000 in tasty treats.
So [...]

Nature Crafts – Building Bird Nests for Kids

Good Morning. I’m still basking in the glow of festival goodness from the weekend. I feel like the tiny person saw enough and made a few very important discoveries about taking care of the Earth this weekend that got her brain moving even more in conservationist mode.
Leave it to a nearly 4-year-old’s bluntly honest ways [...]

Spring NeighbourWood Walks Registration…x2

I am so excited to say that the Our Big Earth NeighbourWood Walks program is officially one year old. We’ve completed four seasons of walking in the woods, on the trails and at the shoreline, exploring nature kid-style. (By the way, this is double-post Tuesday. I’ll have some crafts for you this afternoon)
And, with that [...]

Easter Crafts, Easter Egg Hunts, Easter Food

Well, here we are – the Thursday before Easter – and I’ve got nothing. Seriously, it’s ungood. Thank goodness for our pals Nicola and Mike who threw a big egg bash for the kids last weekend.
I’m hoping I’m not the only momma out there who is relatively unorganized in the Easter/Passover action department. Luckily, it [...]

Register – SPROUTS Children’s Gardening Series

Good morning. After such a gorgeous weekend filled with beach, trail, art, Easter events and all kinds of Spring-like fun, it seems like the perfect time this morning to open up registration for the first SPROUTS Children’s Gardening Series in partnership with the Comox Valley Regional District.
A while back, the CVRD’s  Education and Event Coordinator [...]

Books for Tom Boys & Spring

Good morning. It’s super late for me to be getting going this morning (8 a.m., yikes!). I am totally dragging my butt today in the work universe, mostly because I have plans to ditch the office long enough to spend the ENTIRE DAY outside combing beaches, roaming trails and wrapping it all up with a [...]

Get Away – Planning for April Family Fun

It’s official. We’ve passed that critical point in every year when getting out of town is required by the necessity of maintaining good mental health during the dark days of Winter.
Spring has sprung – and that also means that the Comox Valley begins to spring to life as warmer days mean lots to do close [...]

Get Away – The Brant Wildlife Festival

Good Morning! With Spring Break upon us it seems like the perfect time to scramble for something cool to take the company to or get the family together for.
Easier said than done.
I’ve said it probably way too much. But, Spring is one of the most amazing times of the year on Vancouver Island. [...]

Home Learning – Life Cycles for Preschoolers

OK, so there are a couple realities to working on “learning” projects with a preschooler:
1. Attention span that generally amounts to nanoseconds
2. The constant reminder that 37-year-old mom obviously knows far less than 3.5-year-old child
3. Permanent mess syndrome
4. Sitting at the dining room table is the LAST thing on anyone’s mind when the sun is [...]

SPROUTS – Early Spring Kid Gardening Fun

Brrr, it’s chilly.
On those afternoons when the bright sun makes it tolerable, I stroll aimlessly around my garden with hopeful ideas of planting.
My daughter and I sample a bite from a patch of oregano as it pokes its head out of one of my veggie gardens.  In the front yard we marvel over little yellow [...]

SPROUTS – Plan Your Family Garden

I’m getting excited! The odd peek at sunshine and warmer afternoons means Spring is on its way!
I may have a few months to go before I can even plant outside, but I can already taste the sweet harvest… that means its time for me and the kids to start planning our family garden
After [...]

Family Craft – Paper Tulip Garden

One of my major small successes during the doldrums of any dark and rainy February is to brighten up the house with signs of Spring in any way humanly possible.
If I could paint sunshine and blue skies on all of the windows and not know that if I went outside the sky would be five [...]

Final Spring NeighbourWood Walk – The Filberg

I am shocked at how little time six weeks actually is.
Blink.
From our first meeting out at MacDonald Wood Nature Park to the last moments of exploration and hanging out yesterday at The Filberg, CVK’s Spring NeighbourWood Walk series seemed to just fly by.
I suspect that’s because we were so busy having fun, making friends and [...]

Spring NeighbourWood Walks – Seal Bay

It’s official.
Mother Nature loves us.
Once again, the skies parted momentarily yesterday – long enough for the fifth in our Spring community walk series to be all sunshine and good times at Seal Bay Nature Park’s Swamp Loop.
This is a longish trail, made double long by the fact that there were creatures EVERYWHERE requiring a stop [...]

Spring NeighbourWood Walks – Miracle Beach

I admit it.
I’m an over-extender.
I tend to jam in as much as humanly possible and, some days, the To Do List gets lost in the deep crevasses of my jumbled brain.
After story time at the library, a zoom through the grocery store, lunch on the run, picking up a friend, the weather at Miracle Beach [...]

The Weather & Garden Synch Up

It’s true.
Our Sprouts preschool garden experiment, well, died.
Being entirely new at making anything grow, I had no plan for dealing with the record-cold April and the reality that frost always wins over veggies when push comes to shove.
I’m a little embarrassed, mildly comforted by the fact that a whole whack of people I know [...]

Spring NeighbourWood Walks – Puntledge Greenway

When I woke up yesterday morning to drizzle and chill, I seriously wondered whether we’d hit the trail for our weekly community walk.
Happily, I trusted the weather predictors (dangerous territory) and it turns out that while they were totally wrong about bright sunny skies this morning (where’s my 26 degrees I dreamed about all night?), [...]

Our Very First NeighbourWood Walk

We couldn’t have asked for a more awesome day to kick off the Spring series of NeighbourWood Walks over at MacDonald Wood Nature Park yesterday.
The sunshine and low tide meant this fun walk through the forest turned into a great afternoon checking out crabs and snails and logging serious splashing in with some new friends.
You [...]

Join Us for our NeighbourWood Walks

Want to go for a walk?
With the weather warming, little feet in need of a good run and an itch to explore the region together, we are excited to invite you to join us for NeighbourWood Walks – a series of weekly community walks at spots around the Valley where you can explore the trails, [...]

A Guide to Natural Allergy Remedies

Pollens Be Gone!!
Spring is sprung, the grass is green…the grass, the weeds, the trees…gazoontite!!
While we all look forward to warm sunny weather and longer days, the ‘blooming’ flowers and plants of spring can cause havoc for many kids and parents alike. How can we, as parents, encourage our little people to get some fresh [...]

Build A Pollinator Garden

The first year we lived in our house, the bees were everywhere and our apple trees rewarded us with the biggest, juiciest apples I’ve ever had the pleasure of biting into.
Last year, for some reason, the bees came in much smaller waves, and our apples were nearly non-existent. It was sad and a bit baffling, [...]

Bee-Free Backyard BBQ

* Fact: Most flowering plants require pollination in order to reproduce.
* Fact: The relationship between plants and their pollinators dates back 140 million years. Dinosaurs, bees and butterflies once lived together.
* Fact: Pollinators bring the pollen from one plant to another and in return get food in the form of nectar that the plants [...]

The Birds and the Bees Pollinate Please

The rather frigid nature of our Spring this year may have you thinking twice about the season (although the shot above from local mom Krista gives me hope). But, even as we continue to scrape the occasional frost off of our windshields in the mornings, Mother Nature is waking her kiddos up from their long [...]

When Preschool Gardening Gives Way to Absentmindedness

Bad news first: I have no brain.
It has been missing since about six months into pregnancy…and it is now becoming painfully apparent that its continued decline is starting to effect our day-to-day well being.
…at least when it comes to gardening.
After our unfortunate leaving-outside-overnight incident last week, I lovingly put the sprouts back on the front [...]

Our First Preschool Garden Casualty

The whole gardening-for-the-first time is bound to have some seedling drama.
Today, we had to officially say goodbye to our lettuce, which struggled long and hard after the transplant (note to self: plant lettuce directly into the ground)

It was a sad, solemn day as we had hoped that somehow by magic everything we planted would live [...]

Spots to Watch Spring Migration

Today’s comment challenge: Where are some of your favourite wildlife watching spots on Vancouver Island and other places around the world?
Did you check out the great thread about food and your family yesterday? Thanks to everyone who jumped in. And the winner of a cool dino puzzle is…Stacey. Wahoo. Boynton books up for grabs today.

There [...]

Sprouts – Mid-Week Update

As part of the gardening journal, we’ll be doing short, periodic updates about what’s growing (lots of photos) in addition to the bi-montly write-up.

We have Sprouts!
Here are some from Day 3:
Lettuce and radishes just popping up.
Zucchini nearly sprouting.
Here’s from last night:
The zucchini and marigolds have sprouted and the radishes are just about in need of [...]

Sprouts – A Preschool Gardening Journal

There’s nothing like digging in the dirt.
For weeks around our house the gardening hats and wooden bugs have been planted and re-planted on the living room floor. Her afternoon “gardening” sessions haven’t resulted in anything edible or sprouting, but one thing was clear – our daughter’s itch to get some soil between her toes had [...]

Family Crafts – Making Spring Scenes

I am of the mind that it is time to will the cold away.
While at least mildly unrealistic as February dawns on us, I’m all too willing to perpetuate my delusions of warm sunshine, crocus and tulips pushing their heads up through the still-frozen front garden – in the form of construction paper and cut [...]

Nature Crafts – Bagel Bird Feeder

OK, I’m over all of this serious cold outside.
Brrrrrr…
In honour of coaxing Spring along, and making sure the local birds (who I think are as stunned as we are by this frosty snap) have enough to snack on, I went looking for some cool ideas for making backyard bird feeders today.
There are always pine cone [...]

Family Crafts – Spring Paper Flowers

If your house is anything like mine in January, we all are in serious need of a Spring-like pick-me-up.
Since it’s not quite time to bust out the garden hoe, your best bet for injecting some Spring spirit into your lives is to get crafting.
We found a fun Spring flower craft in, of all places, National [...]

Salmon Viewing on North Vancouver Island

Chances to get outside and check out the amazing creatures living among us, or to find a place that teaches us all about the environment, natural resources and caring for animals on the island are plentiful. Here are a few spots to watch salmon as they make their way to their spawning grounds each year:
* [...]