A learning experience...for everyone!

The kids and I went for a walk today. The purpose for the walk was to bring some recycling to the bins, which happen to be on the other side of the apartment community. The Woodchip Playground is over there as well.

I feel I must complain about the recycling our apartment community does. They don't take all the things. You can bring plastic bottles, paper, cardboard, aluminum cans, glass bottles. I think that's it. If you have tin cans or glass jars, you are on your own. Would it hurt to have two more bins and then FREAKING TAKE ALL THE THINGS???? I'm not throwing that stuff away, but it's annoying to store it up in my apartment or car until we can get to a recycling drop off in town. The joys of apartment living, right? From what I have heard, we're lucky our community recycles at all.

That was not the learning experience though. We've already learned about that.

On the way home, we passed under some oak trees. They are dropping acorns right now. Acorns are kind of fun to look at, so I stopped and said, "Hey, look at these." I explained that acorns are seeds and new trees will grow from them if the conditions are right (and if squirrels don't eat them all). Then we started talking about growing our own oak trees, which led to us gathering up a handful of acorns to bring home. I'm no master gardener, so I offered to look up how to grow oak trees from acorns. It can't be that hard, right? They're just seeds. I sprout seeds all the time. Usually you just soak the seeds, then plant them when they sprout (or eat the sprouts, om nom nom nom).

Well, oak trees, you are much more complicated than I thought. Apparently, acorn seeds need to lie in dormancy for 1000 hours. I am not making that up. I read it on the Internets. The site I found suggested putting the acorns in a plastic baggie filled with peat moss and letting them sit in the fridge all winter. Really? Isn't that going to get moldy?

It doesn't matter because once Reese realized that these oak trees weren't going to grow for months and months, she was easily swayed by the suggestion that we should grow something else. Crisis averted, and I don't have to have a bag of dirt in my fridge all winter. I think that's a win for everyone.

But now we know how the whole acorn thing works. And most of our stuff got recycled. I'd call that a good morning.