I once mentioned to an Amish friend that I had four children and only one of them was interested in going to the barn. He nodded and replied that he had twelve children of his own and only one was interested in going to the barn. He thought this was an ancient rule that applied to farm properties to keep them from getting over-populated.
It’s a question as old as the farm itself. How do you keep a child from souring on chores and the drudgery of tasks like haying and weeding? My wife worked long hours in the garden as a child, kneeling on hard dry ground pulling weeds. She has two calluses on her knees that she blames on those years of servitude, and she rasps them frequently with a big file. “Goat bumps!” she says crossly, because goats get them, too, from kneeling on the ground while they pull grass through a fence. She only recently returned to the cultivation of edibles because I was inspired to organize a series of raised beds she could tend while standing up. It was a breakthrough - the first time I have known her to express a voluntary interest in a vegetable in its natural state.
I believe there is a lesson here. Isn’t there always a lesson? We need to look past the rigid daily routine of farm work and find ways to kindle curiosity and joy in the simple act of feeding ourselves, especially when it comes to our children.
I just said goodbye to my two step grandsons who flew across the country for the first time with my daughter and her husband to spend four days with us on the farm. My wife went to great lengths to prepare food and entertainment for them. The fridge was stocked with yoghurt tubes and fizzy drinks from the store and the yard had a badminton net, a slippery slide and a tether ball set up. She even found two Star Wars light sabres in a trunk in the basement and installed new batteries in them. But when the boys arrived, the first place they ran to was the barn. They bottle fed a lamb, collected the eggs, patted a donkey, then ran with the dogs through the pasture. They picked rhubarb and watched as the rhubarb was turned into a jam before their eyes and smeared over a fresh-baked biscuit. They learned how to put electric insulators on a steel post and then how not to get zapped by the fence when it was turned on. They went fishing in the creek with their uncle and brought home a trout for the pan. They carried a pair of genial barn cats around by the neck. They dug postholes and tightened black wire around a fencepost. They threw scoops of grain at the steers and bedded down the sheep with wheat straw. They don’t own phones, which is a tribute to the good sense of their parents, but they didn’t need them. They never glanced at a screen for the entire four days they were here. The light sabres never got turned on
My own mother left us in the care of various farm families on our concession road for extended periods of time while she pursued a career as a radio host and writer. I was billeted on a dairy farm next door where goldfish swam in the long concrete water tank in the stable while cows sipped from it. I supervised my own flock of hens in a stone pumphouse and picked up fleas from a collie pup named Trixie. I took hay off every field on every farm within three miles. By the age of sixteen I had an extended family of adopted country cousins, uncles and aunts, grandmothers and grandfathers who shaped the way I looked at the world. Later I was moved to the care of a livestock trucker on the same road who drove me to sales barns in every corner of the province. After university, I left that community to seek my way in the corridors of government and finance in the city but I always yearned to come back to the countryside. When I was 30, I bought this 40 acres that became Larkspur Farm.
When I drove the little family back to the airport and said good bye the older of the boys ran back to the window of the car. “Thanks Pops,” he said. “It was the best vacation ever!”