Can 57 year olds know what is cool?

It used to be that if I thought something was cool it usually was.  Two tone shoes, yellow sport coats, Steely Dan and Earth Wind and Fire.  These things will always be cool to me.  Call it "Old School", But the reality is that most of my cool stuff is just old.  I cannot Rap, heck I could never remember all of those words and to spout them out rapid fire. It is just not in the repertoire of and old man especially this old man.  A very few things that are old are still cool,  like Frank Sinatra and Betty White. I think my kids humor me most of the time when I bust out dancing to the song "September".

So what has this to do with farming?  The fact is that I thought it would be a cool thing to incorporate farming into our camp programing.  That is an old person way of thinking.  When I was younger the last thing I would want to do during the summer is spend time in a hot garden plot and picking cucumbers.  As a kid that would be the antithesis of cool.  It would have been categorized as drudgery or chores.  I remember mister Young trying to convince his son Steve and I to bend over the hood of his car so he could teach us how to do an oil change.  Instead we shrugged him off and went and played stickball.  So as an older man when suddenly I had this idea that if we set up a garden and really grew vegetables, that kids "now a days" would be into it. That they would think it was cool.   Dag Gum if I wasn't right.

No really... it has been truly amazing.  We have had four or more groups come to pick veggies in the garden each day.  They want to stuff them into their backpacks and I even had a camper have a melt down over not taking a zucchini back with him to the locker room.  We are setting up a vegetable stand that will be operational tomorrow and there is so much interest that we are working on ways that parents can pay for a bag of produce that the campers will take home on the bus.  We are making signs in arts and crafts and introducing this farming thing has become something of a phenomenon.  Today we picked over a hundred huge cucumbers and will be very busy picking beans and squash tomorrow.

Farmer Josh is now a regular at morning opening exercises and asking for volunteer groups to help him keep up with the harvest.  Everywhere he goes the kids call out to him and call him "Farmer Josh"  He is loving it.  Most importantly, we sneak some bonafide teaching into the mix.  How to pick the cucumbers off the vine without hurting the plant,  how and when to plant,  how to prune, and how prolific a well tended garden can be.   Even more so my director Tim and the head boys counselor Johan are thinking up more cool ideas on how to involve more people.  The suggestion that we open the garden for parents to pick veggies on Saturday is just one that is being kicked around.

Pretty cool huh?

beginning with thew end in mind and now the end in mind

OK sorry for the lack of posts for the month of June.  Or perhaps my many followers are relieved.  Regardless.... a brief explanation and then the long awaited update.

I am a computer dummy (for those that know me that will come as a complete shock!) and I cannot access my e-mail on my desk top.  I don't know why and the problem will not be resolved soon.  Sooooo... I thought I could not post, but clearly I can.  Am I starting to sound like a 57 year old?

Anyways. It is harvest time.  All these posts about tractors and tilling soil and now we are actually picking veggies.  Hooray!!  And not just by farmer Josh.  My Mountainside campers are into it and they are excited to help.  I even had a 6 year old cry yesterday that he could not take a cucumber with him after visiting the garden.  Now I never want an unhappy camper and children crying is bad for business and Nancy was mad at me for not giving him what he wanted.  However... there is a principle here that must be taught if we are going to do this correctly.  That principle is that you pick when the crop is ready, that timing is everything, and if you pick early or late you come short of the very best.  At Mountainside we are going to pick to perfection.

This whole farming thing is really working out just as I had hoped.  Josh had no idea how wonderful summer camp really is.  He never went to camp as a kid and even though I tried to explain what was about to unfold, until you experience camp you cannot truly grasp it.  There are 300 kids waving and smiling at Josh everyday, they are engaged in what he is passionate about

and he has all of these children to teach.  He remarked to a fellow WVU graduate who landed a great job, that he hit the mother lode when he signed on with Bar-T.  Where else can you do what you love everyday and be a focus of attention by a camp full of kids and staff.  At the end of the day yesterday, he hopped into the pool with the extended care campers and they were all over him.  He had this look in his eye that can only be understood by summer camp people.  That look could be best paraphrased by the quote from the movie the Field of Dreams.  "Is this Heaven?" No its Iowa".  "Funny I thought it was Heaven".   I am one of the few people I know, that is afraid that Heaven will be a disappointment.  How can anything get better that what I do everyday.

The veggie stand is being assembled and we start selling produce next week.  Yes there will be another post to mark the occasion.

To Roundup or not to roundup?

While we were on the cruise last week Jason Wood who as been growing corn, wheat and soy beans on the farm for the past few years told me that he planted soy beans.  I was surprised to see the Rye still growing but noticed that the beans had in fact been planted because you could see the planting rows thru the rye.  Each year I made sure that my farmer installed a winter cover crop to reduce erosion and when it became time to plant the field crop they would kill the cover crop to eliminate the competition.  I have concerns about roundup. Killing plants with chemicals so you can grow plants with chemicals seems somewhat counter intuitive.  Heck what do the worms think?

Anyways, my grandson spent the night last night and he is a freak over anything that has a motor and 4 wheels.  Just before Grandma took him to day care, we took a quick ride on the 4 wheeler and what he saw in the parking lot of Mountainside blew his little 17 month old mind.  It was the huge sprayer from Southern States preparing to spray the roundup.  I gotta tell you, farmers have figured out how to make cool vehicles that do farm things that just happen to be bad _ss.  The sprayer has outriggers that must cover 100 feet in a pass are pretty cool.  Little Frankie absolutely concurred as evidenced in the pic.

There will be some serious introspection over the winter with the Round up dilemma.  I could not hope to cultivate 60 acres of vegetables and field crops will always be in the mix.  I just want to be a great steward of the land and do the best thing for the environment.  Any suggestions to this dilemma will be greatly appreciated.