Farming

Central Pennsylvania is a beautiful, calm, and peaceful place to live. I love the humble roots that are everywhere. There’s a reason they call places like this God’s Country.

Here in our little town, we’ve been doing all kinds of farming lately.

On the home front, our tiny veggie garden now looks like this:

I counted 26 tomatoes yesterday! 2 weeks ago there were only 7.

We also went strawberry picking recently, but I don’t have any pictures yet. Strawberry picking is a messy business and I didn’t want to mess up our camera, so I used a disposable one and I haven’t gotten around to having it developed. That same local farm will have raspberries ready to pick next week.

Then I read on my friend Satoko’s blog that she had taken her kids to the local dairy farm where apparently they buy all of their milk and ice cream and I was like…rewind! Say what? Where is the magical ice cream farm? We have been friends for years and live 5 minutes from each other and I have never heard her mention this. I wanted in. So today I learned that there is, in fact, a local dairy farm 8 miles from our house that not only produces it’s own milk, icecream, and other products to sell in an adorable little general store, but they let the kids feed the calves at 4pm every day. Who knew?

Satoko was right, there was ice cream to be had

and vintage parasols to admire

antique tractors to be ridden

calves to be fed

and lots and lots of cows. (and flies.)

We bought milk, ice cream, and apple butter to take home.

The staff was very sweet. One of the young men who worked there made sure the tractor would be safe for our kids to play on (apparently it still works and they actually use it so he had to set the brakes correctly) and they let the kids pet the cows and roam about freely. There were even signs around the property restricting where cars could go so that kids could have free range to run, play, climb trees, or whatever they pleased.

I have to apologize again to Satoko because I got lost in the winding country roads on the way there so we were half an hour late to meet her and her boys. Also, Nick was having so much fun that he didn’t want to leave, so he threw a very dramatic temper tantrum for our last 15 minutes or so together. (and the entire way home, and then a little while longer…) but, regardless, it was a very nice afternoon and we will definitely go back again soon!