Our pumpkin crop was hit and miss this year, leaving us in need of a couple of good jack-o-lanterns. I remembered our CSA had offered that members could come out and pick a pumpkin from the patch if they missed the farm celebration, so one day after school last week, the kids and I headed out to finally visit the farm that feeds us. Now, you might be asking yourselves why we still get a CSA share when we are modern homesteading and growing our own food, and the answer ties into the heart of defining modern homesteading. With jobs, the kids’ school schedule, and other modern obligations, homesteading has to happen in parts. We grow part of our own food, we get part of our food from a local farm CSA share, we go out and forage a part of our food in the wild, and we get part of our food from the grocery store. Now, if you are also asking yourself “what is a CSA?”, it is Community Supported Agriculture, which involves buying a share in a local farm in the spring and getting a share box of veggies every week for the growing season. It’s an excellent way to support local food and local farmers. I am a huge fan.
As I have mentioned in earlier posts, getting pre-teens excited about going out and doing various family activities can be an interesting aspect of parenting. This is where I have found pumpkin patches to be a magical place. No matter how enthralling the book they are reading, or how wrapped up they are in the goings-on of their friends and who said what to so-and-so; the second you step out into a pumpkin patch, kids remember that they are still kids, and begin looking for their perfect pumpkin as though it were the most important quest in the world. They step right back into the yearly tradition as though no time had passed at all since last year’s trip to the pumpkin patch. I felt an added layer of excitement in the whole experience this year finally getting to see Groundwork Organic’s farm and new farmstand. They let us munch on some delicious apples and said we could pick as big a pumpkin as we wanted as part of our share. We took them seriously on the offer. After this, my son still insisted his perfect pumpkin would have warts, so we went across the road to another farm where he found the object of his heart’s desire. It was indeed the wartiest pumpkin in the patch.
As we watch kids grow up, and repeat the same family traditions with them season after season and year after year, we have a great opportunity to observe the ways in which they have grown and changed and the ways in which they are still exactly the same. The experience may be no different from the previous year, but we are always seeing it through a different set of eyes influenced by another year of living in the world. This is not only true for our kids with whom we carry these traditions, but for ourselves as parents. Traditions provide us with other things as well, like a framework for life, a sense of the dependable, and something to look forward to and mark the turning seasons. They are invaluable.
Every October, we go out to the pumpkin patch to find the perfect pumpkin. We can always expect to return home with that prize, but the other things we find in the pumpkin patch are valuable beyond measure.
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