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?