E-I-E-I-O
Written By Simon Firth
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An annual farm vacation gets this family back to the garden.
My wife and I used to be foodies. We'd make ravioli and spanakopita from scratch. On vacation, we'd seek out the best local fare, eating Cuban in Miami, picking crab in Baltimore. We fell in love over and celebrated our anniversaries with good — no, great — food.
Of course, children changed that. But if they took fancy restaurants off the menu for awhile, we figured we'd still have our kitchen, where we'd prepare tasty meals from homegrown organic ingredients, assisted by our little gourmets-in-training. I pictured the tiny hands tilling the soil and carefully planting seedlings, all of us bringing in the joyous harvest.
The sad reality is that Ada, 5, and Michael, 2, are often getting hustled out of the way so I can defrost some fish sticks. (But they're organically breaded, sustainably caught, and mercury-free!) One day, I hope, we'll all be picking and pickling heirloom cucumbers in our backyard. Until then we have Emandal. Emandal Farm is where we spend the last long weekend of summer, in what's become a family tradition. On the Eel River in Mendocino County, California, Emandal is part resort, part camp, and all kid heaven, with dirt, campfires, animals wild and domestic, and berries ripe for the picking, on a thousand traffic-free acres. It's also a way to show small fish-stick eaters where the food on our table actually comes from (and no, it's not from the fish-stick farm).
While no one's required to help out at Emandal, children are welcome to join in. That's really the essence of the place. Kids can help pick the 20 types of tomato or the five varieties of beet, the chard, kale, melons, cucumbers, rhubarb, and every shape and size of squash. Last year Ada spent two earnest hours — an eon, in preschooler time — gathering red and gold raspberries. This year she was not only unfazed by the concept of a purple string bean, she was better than I was at finding the best ones.
Next page: Recipes from Emandal Farm
Also: Tips for planning your own farm adventure
