The Final Farm Camp (of 2015!)

by Breanne Bartok

For our last week of Farm Camp, we decided to shake things up a bit! While our campers certainly got to enjoy time with the chickens and the bees as other camps did, they spent a bit more time learning about soil health and the critters that inhabit our garden at the Outback. 

On Tuesday, Blossoms and Sprouts rotated stations to learn about vermiculture – getting their hands dirty in the worm bin – and digging through the weedy green compost in the garden searching for bugs. From the worm bin to the compost piles to various overturned rocks, we found slimy slugs, curled-up potato bugs, and of course, all sizes of worms. Undeterred by the slime, many campers even had to be heavily coaxed to return our new buddies back to their homes in the ground! 

Wednesday was our day with the Beekeeper. We tasted fresh honey, practiced pumping the smoker used to quiet the bees into a slumber, and watched them busily buzz through a field of flowers. We certainly became experts at not swatting at our fuzzy, buzzy friends. The day wrapped up with singing one of my personal favorite camp songs, “Do You Like to Buzz?”

On Thursday, before preparing a big lunch to share with our grownups, we learned about savings seeds. Campers opened up the pods from kale gone to seed and extracted the tiny black balls hidden within. They then got to decorate their seed packets before carefully harvesting the seeds for the next season.

Our last activity was making Seed Surprises. Campers had helped prepare a “soil potion” that morning of flour, water, oil, and top soil. Alternating between handfuls of dirt and cups of water, we prepared the medium in which we would later enfold wildflower seeds. With luck, they’ll bloom into beautiful flowers for our pollinator friends to feed from and enjoy! 

At last, though, camp this year came to a close. We can’t thank the Outback Farm at Western Washington University enough for sharing their space with us this summer – and letting us eat all the berries, plums, cherries, and other garden yummies we could find! Though Common Threads is done at the Outback for this season, we look forward to seeing our students in some of our school gardens this upcoming year to continue the garden adventures!  

A Day in the Life at Camp Pasta

by Breanne Bartok

The day started off with enough clouds and autumn chill that I wondered how the kids would fare walking around town on their field trip. 

But by the time we had gathered outside The Table and entered into its cocoon of warmth, those worries were dashed. They were all so excited for the day’s events; surely a little rain couldn’t dampen their excitement! 

At The Table, we rotated in groups, with some of us starting off drawing advertisements for our favorite fruits and vegetables (with some very clever slogans, and more than a handful of very artistic drawings!) The other half went into the kitchen to help make and package pasta for our lunch with our grownups on Thursday. Campers got to slice off the noodles oozing out of the pasta-making machine, lay them on the counter, dust them with flour, and then begin weighing them out to exactly 16.0 ounces. We all took turns at these stations, while some others made stickers to date the noodles, others wrapped the carefully-measured pasta in paper and stuck both the date stickers and The Table stickers on the packages. We had made our very own processed food! 

After switching so that every camper got a turn at every station, we walked to nearby Whatcom Middle School to take turns harvesting fresh cherry and grape tomatoes in the hoop house and preparing flatbread and beet hummus in the kitchen. Several campers were wary of a hot pink hummus, but like the Adventurous Eaters we all strive to be at Common Threads, they all gave it a shot!

After lunch, we hopped on the bus down to Fairhaven for a lesson at Drizzle, listening to owners Ross and Dana explain what made good dressings. After letting us sample different kinds of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, they were amazingly generous enough to give each camper a small bottle with which to pick any oil or vinegar in the shop and take some home! Given all the yummy varieties Drizzle offers, it was definitely a hard choice for some. 

Finally, we ended our day at the Fairhaven Farmer’s Market, analyzing the price of local vegetables so we would have an idea of how to price our own produce the next day at our Farm Stand. From playing in the rain to asking farmers questions, from buying berries to trading one yummy carrot for a CD from one of the performers, the campers definitely had fun – rain and all! 

Eager for Edibles

by Breanne Bartok

We were back up to our larger numbers for Farm Camp this week, with the older campers becoming Blossoms and our younger campers becoming Sprouts. With so many curious kiddoes, we ended up spending most of the first day exploring the garden and tasting the ripening blackberries finally juicy and dark enough to enjoy! 

Of course, we got to do more than just pop berries into our mouths and our snacks – though we had our fair share of fresh harvests, to be sure! Blossoms enjoyed making plant identification booklets, sealing together some of the herbs and flowers growing in the Forest Garden between construction paper and contact paper. From sword fern to chicory to fennel and mint, we certainly had plenty to learn and choose from. By the end of the week, the Blossoms were so familiar with edible plants in the Forest Garden that they could identify handfuls of plant species without any help. Some even pointed out some edible plants I hadn’t yet spotted hiding amongst the foliage! They had moved beyond the phase of sheer wonder that one can eat something growing straight out of the ground – and not just from a shelf in a grocery store – and were eagerly awaiting the next edible plant they could identify, seal in their booklets, and savor in their mouths. 

Speaking of savory: Wednesday’s snack, Fruit Spring Rolls, was such a hit that I had several campers begging me to write down the recipes so they could make them at home. (All of our recipes can be found online, by the way!)  By rolling up some of the freshly-harvested blackberries, minced pieces of mint and fennel we had tied together in herb bundles to take home, apple slices, peelings of cucumber, and a drizzle of honey inside rice paper, we had the sweetest, juiciest snack! For those trying to recreate this snack at home, know that handwashing will be required – but so will seconds!!

A Smaller Group, but Just as Much Garden Exploration!

by Breanne Bartok

This week’s Farm Camp saw a smaller group than past weeks, with four campers getting the Outback Farm all to themselves! However, what they may have lacked in numbers, they certainly made up for in enthusiasm. 

We started each day off with a story. Watching the enraptured faces of the campers hanging on every word was as exciting as the actual tale of “How Groundhog’s Garden Grew,” “Sylvia’s Spinach,” and “These Bees Count.” The last story helped the warier campers warm up to the idea of getting a tad bit closer to the bees and learning about how they make honey. Michael, our very own Beeman, did a wonderful job explaining the process without even needing to look at the hives, letting us all touch some of the honeycomb, and handing out samples of honey from this year and from last year’s harvest. The children did a taste test, and while they may not have noticed the more subtle differences between floral and smoky, they could certainly notice how different the two samples looked and tasted! Some were surprised that the honey collected straight from the bees here at the Outback looked the same as the honey in the store. Others were shocked that honeys could taste so different! And all of them came up with very thought-provoking questions when we walked over to look at the hives – from observing and wondering why rocks were put on top of the hives (to keep raccoons out) to wondering why there was a layer of mesh over the hives’ entrances (to serve as a maze through which only the bees of that specific hive could navigate, preventing “robber bees” from entering!) We finished up our Pollinator Day with Honey Seed Balls, a concoction with enough crunchy seeds and cocoa powder to get them excited to lick, bite, and get messy! 

Grownups joined us for lunch on Thursday. We made Zucchini Linguini, preparing a rainbow of colors from a number of Common Threads school gardens. We noticed that some squash was bumpy and some squash was smooth, but they all turned out rather smooth and slimy once we’d peeled it down to the seeds! The peels, the hand-ground pesto, and some edible flowers from the garden made for a colorfully tasty end of the week!

A great week at Camp Pizza

By Breanne Bartok

After overhearing debates about whether or not the spilled water was exhibiting surface tension, navigating demands that five to thirty percent of farm stand profits go to the campers, and watching the campers delegate tasks on their own to create an assembly line of dishwashing, I was reminded that we were certainly working with an older group this week!  Camp Pizza is for ages 7-12, and we go a little further in depth with our activities than we do in Farm Camp. 

This reminder was made even clearer on Thursday, our last day of camp. In making the pizza dough, we realized we only had half the amount of yeast the recipe required. We halved as many other ingredients as possible, which led to a quick lesson on fractions, multiplication, and division. This continued when one grownup purchased 1.25 pounds of beans, but the campers had only set prices per one pound. I refused to pull out a calculator, instead giving a teasing smile and insisting they could do the math. It was worth it when one of the boys realized with a wide smile (and a great business voice!) what the final price should be. 

Yet the campers did far more than brush up on their mathematical skills this week at Camp Pizza. Wednesday was our field trip day, and though the walk from the WWU Outback Farm to the Fairhaven Farmers’ Market was long (with protests of “my feet-wrists are tired!”), it was thrilling to see their enthusiasm as they watched Pizza’zza demonstrate making a pizza and Drizzle concoct blends of aromatic herbs and oils. We familiarized ourselves with pricing of goods at the farmers market and even got to interview some of the farmers there! 

From learning about whole vs. processed foods together to identifying (and actually remembering) scores of plants, Camp Pizza was much more than making pizza – though that was certainly a fun component, to be sure! 

*We’d like to thank Pizza’zza and Drizzle for taking time to show us how pizza and special dressings are made. We’d also like to thank Terra Verde and Joe’s Gardens for providing produce for us to sell at our Farm Stand on Thursday. Finally, a big thank you to Goat Mountain Pizza for firing our pizzas on Thursday and providing lunch for our grownups!* 

Inspiration with Ray of Hope

By Breanne Bartok

Editor's Note: Ray of Hope is a camp run by Rebound of Whatcom County. During the month of July, they bring their campers on a field trip to Common Threads where we run gardening and cooking stations for each group. 

“Who can tell me if worms are garden friends or garden foes?”

“Friends!” shouted a few of the more confident campers. 

“And why do you think they’re garden friends?” I looked around excitedly. I was nearly elbow-deep in compost, trying to retain my own excitement. Soil science is my specialty. 

“Because they eat things like weeds, and when that goes through their gut it gets lots of good bacteria on it and when the worms poop it out, it turns into really healthy soil!” the boy standing beside me answered promptly, his blue eyes shining back at me with his own excitement. 

I quickly restrained the urge to hug another fellow human being who understood the beauty of earthworms. Here was a child who could explain one of their key roles in the soil ecosystem in more understandable terms than any textbook I’d read. So I held back the hug, instead offering a high five and a dose of excitement that may have been lost on some of the other children who hadn’t yet learned the beauty of healthy soil. 

“Why do you think we want yummy, healthy dirt?” I prompted, hoping to convey at least a little bit more of soil science before this batch of campers went into see the chickens. I was ready to provide the answers, but the same boy was ready again: “Because healthy dirt makes healthy plants!”

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Throughout the day, the Ray of Hope campers continued to amaze me. One of the older girls went into a long digression on weeds and nutrient loss in the garden, describing a depth of information I could scarcely have expected.

As counselors, we prepare ourselves to provide a safe space for the Ray of Hope campers, give them some delicious fresh food to eat, and teach them about gardening and nutrition. To be honest, I had not expected them to be such wells of knowledge, for many Ray of Hope campers come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds or are dealing with some form of trauma, and thus have many other things on their plates. Yet many of them were as enthusiastic – if not more so – than any other group of kids I’ve worked with. Each week, the Ray of Hope campers teach me as much as I think I teach them. And that’s as satisfying as any of the plump plums I’ve eaten this week.  

Bountiful Berries and Buzzing Bees

 by Breanne Bartok

I think I’ve eaten more berries in the last two weeks of Farm Camp than I have in at least the last five years. It’s easy to be excited about the weekly bounty of berries we get to pluck for our snack! 

I’m not the only one who loves feasting on fresh food from the forest garden; this week, we made Veggie Spring Rolls with many of the raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries that grow in the garden. Drizzle on a little bit of honey to celebrate our theme of Pollinators, attempt to keep the rice paper from bunching up before it’s ready to be rolled, and you’ve got one delicious snack! One younger camper even went home begging his grownups for Spring Rolls, prompting the entire family to make fresh, veggie-filled rolls for dinner! 

Wednesday continued to sprout new ideas for campers. We had a visit with our very own “Beeman,” Michael, who, clad in his white bee suit, let us taste some fresh honey from the Outback hives. He showed us the smoker he uses to trick the bees into thinking fire is nearby, then eating large amounts of honey for nutrition in case they need to flee the hive. They usually eat too much to move, though, so he can work with the hive while they work through their food coma. After some of our snacks this week – like the Crunchy Bean Tacos on Thursday – many of us could relate! 

Our campers loved trying the fresh honey and drizzling it on their snacks. Like the first week of Farm Camp, they also couldn’t get enough of the chickens! Between our feathered fowl, thorny thistle, grueling Morning Glory, and beloved bees, we have a farm full of “garden friends” and “garden foes” – and by the end of the week, many of the campers were experts at identifying not only friend or foe, but species and botanical uses for it. The conversations on uses of lemon balm and plantain may not have been quite as exciting as actually harvesting the fresh plums and kale, but making crafts, like our Garden Stained Glass, out of the living environment helped open eyes to new ways we can benefit from having so much greenery around us!