Bring Your Daughter to the Farm Day

I brought my daughter with me to the farm last Saturday. Just us two: an eight-year-old girl and her mom on a date to work on the farm. She brought her gardening gloves, her camera, her book, and a snack. I brought my gardening gloves, a water bottle and an apple. I opted to not bring my headphones because I’d figured we’d be keeping each other company.

Well I have been wrong before…at first she wanted to go see the horses in the field and take their pictures. I won’t bore you with the 14 shots of horses. Although she wasn’t helping me with weeding the strawberry patch (I remembered long sleeves and pants to avoid thistle-burn!) I enjoyed looking up and seeing her.  My independent 8-year-old, camera bag across her shoulder, traipsing through the long grass and being careful not to step on any growing vegetable plants…I felt proud (if not a little lonesome). The only song that would come to mind was one from the kids’ silly songs CD…”well it’s corn, corn, corn that makes me feel forlorn…on the farm, on the farm…”

Eventually she came over to tell me about the pictures she took. “So do you think you’re going to help me a little bit now?” “No, I have to go see the horses and pigs inside the barn now. Sorry, Mommy.” So I went back to singing silly songs and wishing for my headphones. She came back to report that all the horses were now named, and their names were:
1.    Toffee
2.    Hershey
3.    Caramel
4.    Ice Cream
5.    Cocoa (you might be noticing a trend by now)…and
6.    Cookie

“If you help me for just five minutes at a time, it’d add up and we could be done here sooner,” I reminded her. She finally concurred. For ten minutes she took the buckets I was filling with weeds and carrying them through the strawberry patch to dump them into the awaiting cart.
First hour down.

Bella spent the second hour making a gorgeous and complicated weed bouquet. She had a few dandelions, some “non-spiky thistle,” some kind of fern and some violets. For a while we debated over which makes a better string to tie a bouquet together with: dandelion stem or a long blade of grass. She rallied for the dandelion but when it didn’t work she tried my suggestion of the grass. Now, what to do with this bouquet? She decided to place it near the vegetable pick-up area so that everyone coming could enjoy it. She then logged another ten minutes dumping weed buckets for me.
Second hour down.

By the start of the third hour I needed a change of scenery and went over to the rhubarb patch. I had spent a great deal of time there in my first and second weeks and now all my hard work was threatening to come undone by the fast-growing weeds. I asked Bella to take some pictures of the things I had meant to take pictures of myself: the barn, the neat rows of lettuce in the greenhouse. She even took some pictures of me.

In the rhubarb I found a praying mantis egg sack and told her the story of the time I had gotten one from “the butterfly lady” who had put on an assembly for the Girl Scouts. It was in a plastic cup and though I was so excited to have gotten it from her, it was promptly forgotten about on the kitchen counter. Until, that is, the morning we woke up and the counter and wall were covered by tiny praying mantises: each egg sack can hold 100-200 babies! Luckily there was a window right there and we were able to open it and encourage them all outside that way.

She humored me by listening to my story, ate her snack, spent ten more minutes dumping weeds for me. I wondered if she had a good time, three hours is a little long to spend at the farm at once. On the way to the car, she skipped beside me and asked, “That was so much fun, Mommy. Could I even bring a friend next time?”

Written by guest blogger Gina Sampaio who is enjoying and sharing her experience of being a first time Community Supported Agriculture member.