Farm Day

This year we added a new event to our schedule- Farm Day!

This idea came to me because when friends come over they LOVE all of our animals and I usually end up giving a tour and some mini lessons on animals. I remember when we didn’t have any animals, and I loved taking my kids to farms so they could interact with the animals and learn more about all of them!

So I decided to open up our Farm one Saturday a month to host “Farm Day!”. We have done one so far, and I have two more on the calendar this summer. I open up 10 slots for ages 3-10 and we have a three hour “open farm” morning! The first one was a huge success and we all had a blast, even though it started pouring right as everyone arrived.

We started out with the chickens and got to see and hold the two day baby chicks, then the month old chicks and then let the big chickens out of the coop for the day. I let the visiting kids collect the eggs, and hopefully one day soon I will be getting enough daily eggs to send a couple eggs home as their “goodie bag”.

We then moved on to our pigs, and Kiah helped out with that portion of the day. He taught the visitors a few things about pigs and then we fed them some apples and gave them some back scratches.

Finally, we visited our rabbits and everyone got to hold the baby bunnies. They were at the perfect age for being held and interacted with!

(For our next farm day, we will also make sure to visit the sheep, but we didn’t have the sheep when we did our first Farm Day. We will also end the day with a homemade mulberry lemonade popsicle, because they are DELICIOUS and come straight from our mulberry trees).

When we had visited all of the animals, I realized that we still had over an hour left of Farm Day, and I had a mini freakout. I started thinking of a craft or a game that we could play to fill up some time, but then I realized that one of the best things about living on a homestead with acres of land is just the freedom to run and play. So I explained the boundaries of our property and then told the visitors that they could free play for an hour. Their faces LIT UP and they were OFF! Some of them still wanted to stay and interact with the animals, so I also facilitated that. But most of them wanted to play in the creek and get as muddy as possible. They had a BLAST and I heard many words of protest from kids when it was actually time to go.

This was such a simple idea and so easy to implement! I foresee a lot of farm days in our future! Would you come to a farm day hosted on our farm, or a similar event local to you?