Homegrown Garden & Art Camp

This is the third summer I've offered a weeklong Garden & Art camp at my home for girls Claire's age.  Many of the girls come each year and this year as they were arriving, I was thinking ahead and wondering if we'll keep this ball rolling into their adolescence, and wondering what that would look like.  I'd be honored to hold that space for them as they get older.  I suppose we'll just see how things unfold.

Considering that the first year I did this the group was 5-7 years old and now they are 7-9 years old, things have changed a bit.  In a way I saw it coming and I shifted my plans a touch- not bringing in other people to do projects as I have in the past, not planning quite as many projects for the week, planning instead on allowing there to be more open time for them to just........ be.  To just be together and play and get creative and muddy and wild and laugh deep full belly laughs and jump off of things and splash and squeal.  Watching them I felt like I was watching summer as it should be, and I loved it.

I still got materials for lots of great projects.  We made salve again, and indigo dyed (pillowcases this time).  We made bug spray and did some painting and embroidery.  Each girl made her own set of hand-dipped beeswax birthday candles to use at her next birthday celebration, and there was ample time in the garden learning about herbs and time wrangling and tending the chickens.  Within an hour of camp getting started on the first day one friend asked if we could please make jam again and when I told her the raspberries were already all done she didn't miss a beat and said "ok- well how about those cookies?"  Last year we made peanut butter cookies and raspberry jam and we maybe enjoyed them together by dipping the cookies into the sticky and still warm jam pot after all the jars were filled.  "Yes, we can for sure make cookies again", I said.


As they are now older and more capable and less squirrelly I felt comfortable taking them on a longer expedition and so one day we walked a ways to a trail and splashed and played and had lunch by the swimming hole and then walked back.  The walk back was not without complaints and it was not carried out at what I would call a fast pace.  It was more of a dragging, ambling......'shuffle' back.  At one point I was carrying four or five backpacks.  They really were such troopers and some of them were probably carrying two thirds of their own weight in wet towels and clothes and lunch stuff, so..... I carried.


One sweet girl who comes every year was recently asked "so what kind of camp is this that you go to?" and she replied "oh- we make jam and salve and stuff like that. It's a farming and earth camp."

I'm good with that.  In fact, I love it.



So here we are - year three of my little homespun, homegrown Garden & Art (or 'Farming & Earth') camp completed.  It just keeps getting better.  In fact, this year I've done a few days for the younger set (4-5 year olds), and I have a couple 'Mama Camp' days coming up as well.  I'm loving it all and excited about the possibilities herein for connection and fun and memory-making and all other sorts of goodness as well.  And this group of girls?  It is an honor and a joy to watch them just be together and enjoy summer, and I am thrilled to get to be a part of their childhood summer memories.