Down on the Farm

We live in the city. Not like a really big city or anything, but a neighborhood, where the kids are walking distance from school and I could ride my bike to the store if I wanted to. (I don’t.)

As a kid, I grew up in the country, ten miles out of our small town. I could see my horses from my bedroom window and my parents had a garden which supplied most of the year’s vegetables after a few days of canning. The idea of living in a place with street noise and street lamps is completely foreign to me, and yet here I am.

My aunt has a farm just a few miles away (in Oregon, you are never really that far from “the country”) and I like to take the kids out there on the weekends to get their hands a little dirty. Summertime is the best time for this and we spend some time picking tomatoes, feeding the cows and chickens and driving the tractor, which is really a riding lawnmower but don’t tell my son.

It builds character.

The cows get the spent corn stalks.

We learn about the birds and the bees.

These white pumpkins will be the envy of the jack-o-lantern community.

The children have little patience for picking, but endless patience for petting chickens.

Last weekend we picked maybe 30 pounds of tomatoes, all varieties.

My daughter likes to put flower blossoms in our veggie bucket.

On summer weekend afternoons, my kitchen smells like the garden as tomato sauce bubbles on the stove all day. A quick spin in the food processor and off to the freezer it goes…tomato sauce for the entire year.

No tomato is spared.

My apologies to my co-workers on Monday mornings. I can’t get the smell of garlic and onions off my hands.