Summer 2021: Farm Week

 Week 5 of 8: Farm Week

Longview Farm Park

Anyone who knows me, knows that farming and agriculture is a passion of mine. I think that too many people are too disconnected from the actual growing and raising of the food we eat. So I definitely needed to include a "Farm Week" this summer and spend some time talking to the kids about food and where it comes from, plus take them some places to see the crops and animals up close!

Destinations

Our park this week was another new one... Longview Farm Park! It's not far from us and it was a very nice little park! It had a typical playground, but I enjoyed that they had a set of large wood blocks that the kids could use to build towers and things. What really makes this park special is that it's the home of an equine therapy program. The barn and horses are available for viewing which made it the perfect park for this week. There is also a nice little walking trail through some woods which was beautiful and easy enough for all the kids to do.

There's just no way to do a "Farm Week" and not visit Grant's Farm. We

hadn't been in two or three years so it felt like a whole new experience for the kids. We did ALL the things. We bottle fed the goats, fed grain to the other animals, rode the carousel, got temporary tattoos, saw the Clydesdales, milked a pretend cow, and ate lunch in the beer hall. Of course, I took advantage of my free beer too! 

After having fun with all the farm animals at Grant's Farm, I wanted to take the kids somewhere to see the plant-food side of farming so we hit up Eckert's. We drove over the Belleville, IL and the kids got to pick peaches, corn, and cucumbers.

Another great destination option would be Purina Farms, but when I looked into it their reservations were all booked for the month so it didn't work out for us. It's a really fun option for the Farm theme though. 

Crafts and Activities

We did so much running around this week that crafting wasn't the big focus, but the kids did have fun using watercolors to paint some blank egg cartons which we can use for our own backyard eggs.

Special Treats

I am way too proud of the "mud pie" I made this week. Like many other weeks, I started out by utilizing an inexpensive kit from Aldi. In this case, it was a Jello No-Bake Chocolate Cheesecake. I will tell you, vehemently, that this is not cheesecake. I think it's almost a crime that this product markets itself as such... haha. This is a cheap, chocolate pudding pie. But like many of the Jello kits I used this summer it was great for my purposes. I did dress it up by adding two other chocolate layers. I used the cookie crumb crust and put the Jello filling in the bottom. Then I added a layer of homemade chocolate whipped cream, and topped it off with a muddy looking puddle of homemade chocolate ganache. To really sell it, I added a few little piggy figures and the final result looked adorable. 

I also pulled together a food board with a lot of the foods my kids love, paired with signage to show where those foods came from. I tried very hard to talk a lot this week about how almost everything we eat is thanks to farmers and the things they raise/grow. They have brought it up several times long after Farm Week was over so the lessons must have stuck! 

Entertainment

It was such a busy week that we didn't need too many movies to round it out but we did watch "Home on the Range" on Disney+ which we had never seen before.