Know Where Your Food Comes From by Visiting Farms and Buying Local

For the last few weeks, we’ve been staying at Earthen Heart Farm in Bangor, Michigan for our second wwoof experience. We’ve had a great time here, helping Julian get his operation running for the summer, but one of our favorite things is that we have also gotten to explore his network of other farmers. Julian is all about building community and he regularly works with other farmers in the area. My husband has been over to another farm to help plant apple trees. We have connected with the Eater’s Guild to buy goat milk for yogurt, as well as to tour their operation. Most recently, we visited the Peterson’s Pig Farm where Steve and Jan Peterson were kind enough to give us a full tour.

 

 

We got to visit all of the pigs including the sows with piglets, the sows who are not pregnant or nursing and the boars. All of the pigs at his farm have plenty of room to run and root, as well as access to food and water all day and night. The Petersons have raised pigs for 35 years. Recently they have begun to sell quite a bit of their pigs to the Neiman Ranch, which supplies high end grocery stores like Whole Foods and restaurants like Chipotle.

 

 

This was the first time we visited a farm that has this wide of a distribution. As a consumer, I take care to buy sustainable meat and produce and to buy as locally as I can. However, I can’t always buy directly from a farm, especially now that I don’t have the freezer space to buy in bulk. Buying at the grocery store is hard for me because I want to make the good choices for my family, but I never know how much truth there is behind those labels. Even though my family doesn’t eat pork, this farm visit opened my eyes to the importance of getting out to these farms and meeting the people who supply the food that comes into places like Whole Foods. By talking to Steve, I learned about exactly what the company asks of him as a supplier and got a clearer understanding about what some of those labels in the supermarket mean. This may have been our first farm visit to a farm like this, but it sure won’t be our last. I want my family to become more and more aware of where our food comes from. As consumers of meat and vegetables, we owe it to ourselves to get out to the farms and ask questions, talk to the farmers, and know where our food is coming from.

Preschool Homeschool Cards

My youngest son has only just turned four. We decided early on that he didn’t need to do any sort of “curriculum” for awhile. Instead, we would let him follow his interests and we would spend a lot of time talking to him about what was going on, which brings in colors, letters, shapes, vocabulary etc. This also allows us time to label items in English, French and Arabic for him and expose him to quality t.v. shows and iPad apps in all three of his languages. However, he has been very jealous of the fact that his brothers have “homework”. It gave them the “privilege” of mom’s attention, first dibs on technology, etc. etc. So to help the situation – and to stop the constant question of “What can I do mom?”, I created these “homework” cards for him.

We printed them, laminated them, put magnet tape on the back and hung them on the refrigerator. As the day goes on, if he starts acting bored, I ask him to “pick a card”. He chooses what he wants to do using the picture clues and moves it to the right hand side of the fridge. Then he does his activity. Sometimes he lasts 5 minutes at the activity. Other times he lasts 50 minutes. He has no time limits, but is required to clean up one activity before he can pick another card.

The difference in his behavior since we started this has been phenomenal! He is now rarely jealous of his brothers’ homework, because he has his own. He spends a lot less time wandering around annoying those people who are trying to work, which makes life so much easier for all of us. And he is much more willing to do things he might not usually want to do, like calendar, simply because he chose it and it wasn’t Mommy saying “Let’s do this now.”

If you’re interested in using these choice cards with your children, feel free to grab them from my Teachers Pay Teachers store. They are a free download.

Our First RV Vacation

While we live fulltime in our RV, we actually stay stable in certain places for one to four months at a time while we workamp. (See this previous post about our 2015 plan to workamp and live without paying rent.) However, we have been lucky enough to schedule our workamping positions so that we have a week or two off in between jobs, allowing for many vacations throughout the year. During these vacations we plan to explore and work on our family motto of Live Your Life!

We are now completing our first such week, here’s where we have been and what we did with our time:

 

We left our first, amazing placement at Thus Far Farm on Saturday, March 28th with some tears shed and a catch in our hearts, but ready for adventure.  Our first stop was only an hour away at Talluah Gorge State Park in Talluah Falls, Georgia where we hiked, saw waterfalls and crossed the scary hanging bridge. (My kids say I’m the only one who thinks it’s scary!)

 

 

Next we headed to the Great Smoky Mountains – on the North Carolina side - where we explored a historic farm and then drove through the steep, snow covered mountains, enjoying beautiful views and crossing our fingers that our old RV would make it – it did!

 

 

Our third stop was in Knoxville where the kids enjoyed The Muse – a science and discovery museum, planetarium and the playground just outside it for hours.

 

 

For our fourth stop, we were supposed to go to the Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky, but our GPS led us only to the supervisor’s office, not to an entrance. Instead, we found a local state park – Fort Boonseborough and enjoyed hiking around a Civil War Fort, Native American dwellings and playing near the river.

 

 

When we hit Cincinnati, Ohio, we stopped at the Cincinnati Museum Center which houses multiple museums in an old train station. We only attended the Natural History Museum because it was what was covered by our NSTC pass, but it was more than big enough to explore and enjoy the day, including a cave and a trading post where the boys were able to win fossils of their own with their work on the daily scavenger hunt.

 

 

Next stop was Columbus, Ohio and their famous COSI museum.  This had to be the biggest and most amazing museum that we ever went to. It was packed because of a combination of Spring Break and rainy weather, but there was tons to explore from the Progress exhibit that showed how life had changed from 1898 to 1962 to the hands on Gadgets exhibit to the “Kidspace that was like a separate kids museum inside the larger museum. We spent five hours at the COSI and still didn’t see it all.

 

 

The last stop on our journey – before we head for our new WWOOF position on Earthen Farm in Bangor, Michigan – is in Dundee, OH at Evergreen RV Resort where my father drove in from Buffalo to spend Easter weekend with us.  The campground has a lovely indoor pool and hot tub as well as tons of events for the kids for Easter. Plus we’re right in Amish country!  Great way to end a great week.

According to my son the best part about the whole vacation was that no matter where we went, he got to sleep in his own bed each and every night! Having our own RV is paying off these days.