Session 3 of Sunshine Days: Food Day!

A little rain never scared away a farm camp! Although there wasn't too much sunshine today, we just moved our fun into the hoop house to stay dry.

Our focus today was on food and the importance of local organic farms like Crossroads. We wanted to experience the "farm to table" trend and really understand where our food comes from--and understand that it doesn't just appear in the supermarket. It's an important lesson that we were able to make fun and tasty!

To start our rainy day activities, we worked a little bit on our journals. For those who have been in the program since the first session, their journals are getting pretty full. And for our new friends, they were able to start fresh on a brand new journal.

There was finally a short break in the rain and we went for a quick walk around the farm. We checked out the beautiful crops we have growing and of course took a detour to visit the animals. We swung by the honeybees to give a soft "hello" and made our way back.

After our walk, we painted crop label for our fields. The children used a list of our crops with their names and pictures and created pretty labels for them. Here were the popsicle artists at work:

And here were the finished results; some will be labeled with markers when they dry:

After we washed up and cleaned up the tables from all the paint, it was food time! We decided to make a salsa with all the abundant tomatoes and herbs we have growing here at the farm. We split up into groups to do some chopping, cutting, dicing, and mixing. The result was a delicious mix of tomatoes, corn, string beans, peppers, basil, garlic, onions, olive oil, salt, and pepper. We enjoyed our farm fresh concoction with some chips and the rest of our lunches.

These were the young chefs working very hard to bring farm-fresh produce to our lunch table:

And.....Viola! A big bowl of Crossroads farm-fresh salsa:

It was delicious and we had a blast making it!

We enjoyed our colorful creation as well as our lunches until we were done at 1 pm. We are looking forward to a bug and honeybee themed day on Thursday!