I have always been one who wants my chidren to learn things in the most natural way possible. I feel that the best lessons are learned in the garden and on the farm. I want them to understand that milk, meat, cheese, vegetables, flour, and even brown sugar and vanilla come from a very basic source not just from the store.

In one of our adventures (and yet another reason that my kids call me Amish) we went down south to pick cotton from their grandma’s farm. We then picked it from the seed, carded, spun, and crocheted the cotton into a small patch of cloth. We have taken wool from a friends sheep…cleaned it, carded it, and spun it into yarn as well. We regularly use a washboard and wringer to do certain pieces of laundry. Most recently, we went to a friends farm with the intention of hand cutting some of their wheat. Because they were in the midst of harvesting we couldn’t take too much of their time doing that so we watched as they cut the wheat, then the kids went with the farmer to gather the stalks from the combine and loaded them into a bedsheet for us to bring home. That night we threshed some of the wheat by walking on it over and over again. We weren’t able to get enough of the wheat berries to come out that way, so we are going to go through each stalk to collect the rest of the berries. From there, we have to separate the wheat from the chaff and then grind it by hand and make bread to give back to the farmer that we got the wheat from.

I will try to post some pictures later on some of these things.