killing the field.

In the early homeschool days, science was one of my favorite topics. It was so easy to feel productive - pull out the microscope and look at things in high magnified detail. Boom. Science. Baking = Chemistry. Let’s figure out how things interact! The mac daddy of them all at that time: Baking soda and vinegar. Janine, CJ (a friend who homeschooled with us for a while), and I would spend so much time outside testing baking soda and vinegar rocket bomb explosion devices. We would put vinegar in a pop-top water bottle, put in a small coffee filter filled with baking soda, screwed the top on, closed the lid, shook it up, and threw it as high as possible. BOOM! POP! SIZZLE! The pressure in the bottle would force the pop top open, and the now spent liquid mixture inside would spew from the falling, spinning vessel. On one fateful day, we decided to work our chemical magic in the back yard instead of the street in front of the house. We exploded a few bottles to our hearts’ content, then went inside.One thing to note. My dad grew up on a farm. He has amazing skills when it comes to helping green things grow. Since we lived in the middle of a suburb, the yard was essentially his field - his pride and joy.What we didn’t know at that time was that the baking soda and vinegar experiments we had done over the grass weren’t passive. The mixture invaded the lush greenness of the yard-field, and killed a large patch of the grass. It stayed dead for quite a while. We learned a lesson that day. Baking soda and vinegar experiments don’t blend well with grass. Note taken. Sorry about the grass, dad. :)