Every camper gets a chance to dive deeper into the life of a farmer during morning programs. The yurts rotate between hands-on lessons with the animals and in the garden.

Our animal specialist Emma helps the campers to feel more comfortable safely interacting with farm animals while learning the in’s and out’s of taking care of them. Here campers from Yurt 1 take time for a bunny cuddle.

Kara, the garden specialist has been teaching the campers not only what kind of plants you can grow and eat, but also what  those plants need in order to grow. Campers have been getting a chance to connect with where their food comes from and participate in the growing and harvesting of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Yurt 2 has weeded and prepared a bed to be planted.

Farmstead crafts are also offered during morning programming. Campers learn to take the products from the farm like wool, milk, and berries and turn them into yarn, butter, and jam! One of the favorite morning programs is a session we like to call wild card. This program is anything from team building to yoga. Here the boys yurts 6 and 7 perfect their balance by the stream.

By lunch the campers have already grown their food, cared for animals, and found a peaceful place to breath!

This is the second summer at Farm Camp  for our chefs Anna and Elliot. They do an amazing job of preparing nutritional meals using as much food grown and raised at the farm as possible. And of course the food is always super yummy! Anna and Elliot are working on a Farm Camp Cookbook with simple, kid-friendly meals made with farm fresh ingredients. This summer all of the campers are learning to make pizza dough from scratch and choose their own toppings. The campers are proud of their hand made creations and definitively enjoy eating their hard-earned dinners!

Session A farm campers got their first taste of farm life this morning. The wake up call came at 7am  (some farmers would call that sleeping in, but our campers need plenty of rest for all the other fun activities of the day). After getting ready for the day each yurt takes on a chore. The older girl’s yurt, who have named their yurt “the Flying Moostaches”, cleaned and set up the dinning hall for breakfast.

The younger girl’s yurt, now known as the “Yogurt Yurt”, got to know the chickens and the quail during chores. The girls learned about the breeds of birds we have here on camp and how to collect eggs from the coop. The chicken coop was filled with squeals as the girls tried to carefully scoop up a baby quail or a chicken to hold.

In the barn the boys did a great job of mucking the stalls and feeding the goats, sheep, llama, alpacas, pigs, and rabbits. They even got to experience being a surrogate momma cow for our calf named Ghost who is still being bottle fed.

These guys are not afraid to get dirty, that is why they nicknamed their yurt “the Dirt Yurt”. I’ve never seen kids so excited about shoveling poop before!

After morning chores the kids gather for flag raising then head inside for a delicious breakfast including farm fresh eggs.

Not long after the snow melted and the ground temperature slowly began to climb, this year’s

green strawberry leaves began to poke through the brown, shriveled remains of last year’s foliage.

Strawberries have been celebrated this year at the farm, as we’ve been scurrying to get seeds sown, weeds pulled, rows hoed, and mulch put down, the strawberries (a perennial that has already been well established in the garden) have been producing like crazy and not asking us for very much attention.

A little weeding and compost has gone a long way in producing a bumper crop of strawberries. Now all we need is for all the campers to arrive and enjoy the sweet, red bounty of the Frost Valley Farm!

If you’ve never picked a strawberry before you may not know that they come in all shapes and sizes. Homegrown, organic strawberries have a juicy sweetness that is unrivaled by their super-market replicas.

Here at the farm we don’t use pesticides to keep bugs from eating our delicious crops, but we have employed two guinea hens that work night and day at bug removal.  Here they are before they were let loose for a bug feast.

And if the bugs get to the strawberries before the guinea hens do their security rounds…we just make bug-eaten-strawberry art and feed them to the chickens.

In parts of Bavaria, country folk still practice the annual rite each spring of tying small baskets of wild strawberries to the horns of their cattle as an offering to elves. They believe that the elves, are passionately fond of strawberries, will help to produce healthy calves and an abundance of milk in return.

I am hoping that the strawberries we have sacrificed to the bugs this spring will help to produce healthy, bug free produce for the rest of the summer.

Strawberries have many culinary friends (chocolate and shortcake are a couple of my fav’s), but who can resist the classic spring pairing of strawberries and rhubarb?  The elephantine rhubarb growing in the garden is a perfect match!

Right now you may be asking yourself, “what is more exciting than strawberry-rhubarb sauce on vanilla bean ice cream with whipped cream?” I’ll tell you what- CAMP STARTS TOMORROW!! Pretty soon the kids will be as prolific as the strawberries and the real magic of the Frost Valley Farm will begin again!

My name is Kayla and I will be the Assistant Farm Camp Director this summer.  I am from Northville, Michigan and just graduated from Lake Superior State University with a degree in Sport and Recreation Management.  I have worked for several YMCA camps throughout the United States for the past five summers and attended YMCA camps as a child.  This summer I am very excited to share my camping experiences with campers and learn more about farming. Since I have been at Frost Valley farm camp I have learned how to do felting and spindling which are just a few of the many activities that the campers will be able to participate in this summer. Recently, Andy and I have planted several vegetables in the garden beds and planted tomatoes in the greenhouse.  I am very excited for these plants to start growing and have the children care for these plants.  Every day I am learning something new about our garden and greenhouse, throughout the summer campers will be able to learn and care for the garden and greenhouse. I’m looking forward to a great summer and can’t wait for the campers to arrive!

During the past few weeks as I have been learning the ropes at the farm, I have been very fortunate to get a good amount of help from Frost Valley Staff and Alumni!  Collectively, there has been about 10 different folks put time in at the farm and they have worked a total of over 80 volunteer hours!  From weeding the beds, to building new compost bins, to loading up the greenhouse with fresh tomatoes plants, they have done a ton to get the farm ready for all the campers making their way here during the summer!  Take a look at some of the things they have gotten done and some of the sights they have seen in and around the farm this spring.

We have lots of new additions arriving at the farm! From goats to lambs to baby chicks we are enjoying our new babies.

We need some help with names! Put your suggestions in the comments below and we’ll let you know the names shortly!

Being a kid I distinctly remember my grandfather’s first year after my grandmother passed. He moved to an apartment at a retirement village. He would go over to the nursing part of the village for meals and could never figure out why all those “old people” were so grumpy. He was 95 at the time so he had at least 10 years of “oldness” on them yet he approached life in a very kid-like manner. Sitting by the swimming hole listening to the stream and day-dreaming these pleasant memories of my grandfather turned to the thought “where does one go to be a kid today.” The obvious answer was Farm Camp so I asked both a staff member and multi-year returning camper what it meant to them. First, the camper perspective.

When John first came up and asked me to write about what being a kid meant to me and how being at Farm Camp helps me to be a kid, I thought of the easy answers. Being small, being bossed around, and going to school. Then I thought of the more significant (and opposite) parts of being a kid. So let’s start with the first part of the question. What being a kid means? Being a kid is the stage in our lives that shapes what we are as an adult. An irresponsible kid makes an irresponsible adult, a happy kid makes a happy adult, and an angry kid makes an angry adult. Since the first 1/5 of our life makes us who we are for the last 4/5’s of it there is nothing more important than having a happy healthy childhood. This is where Farm Camp comes in. Farm Camp is not just an ordinary camp with barn animals; it is a place where kids get shaped into what will one day became their future selves. This being my third year at farm camp I can tell you that it has changed my life and never for the worse. At Farm Camp most of our day is consumed by fun and games, something any child’s summer should have, but when chore time comes around everything gets done. Nobody slacks on their chores because they know that the chores not only help run the camp, but they help each individual kid in their everyday life. So not only do we have fun and enjoy ourselves, but we take on responsibilities, ultimately making us into happy, fun-loving and responsible adults.                                                                                                                              -Liam aged 13, 3rd year Farm Camper

To me, being a kid at Farm Camp means having so much fun that I forget the day of the week. Running so fast, I forget where I’m heading and rolling down hills of hay in my sleeping bag. It means, milking goats and kissing cows named Marshall. Being a kid means eating as many s’mores as I can (then eating one more). It means overcoming my fears with new (lifelong) friends and embracing a newly discovered me. That’s what being a kid at Farm Camp means to me.       -Cierra, counselor

(This is a guest post written by a volunteer “J” who was here last week)  I want to say a few things about the weather. We’ve had sunshine, moonshine, starshine, wind, humidity, and it’s rained every day since Sunday. Ugh, you might think. But the exact opposite is true. Like the earth revolves around the sun, activities revolve around the weather. The weather is not a big deal because nobody treats it like a big deal. There’s no psycho weatherperson at flag raising  impending doom or storm tracker pictures. You simply dress for the day (sometimes that could be a few different outfits including footwear, so make sure to send you child with lots of clothes—especially socks and under garments and a pair of boots). I think when I come home, I’ll nix the morning radio reports, look out the window, and listen to music. J.

The morning’s chore for the youngest girls today was harvesting potatoes. Usually digging into the ground yields rocks, worms, bugs, roots, and of course dirt so it’s such a special surprise when you dig into the ground and pull out something to eat;especially, a big red potato. All shapes and sizes, some buried deep, some not so deep and some still on the root. The first time I harvested potatoes I was in my forties. Your kids all have a head start. When it was all over (about 20 minutes), there was close to 100 potatoes (John estimated 30 pounds) harvested from about 10 plants. At flag raising, which follows morning chores, the miners were very excited to share their morning activity during the “Anything Cool to Share” part of the agenda. What remains? Will we have potatoes for dinner? J