The little village of Bakerton, WV was really hopping this past weekend, as folks from all around came to participate in dance, music, a petting zoo, pony rides, chin-up bars, and yes, a booth from Ridgefield Farm.
Scott Beard hosting the Ridgefield Farm produce booth.
Wanda asked us to participate, and Scott set up the works. In addition to our great jams, jellies and apple butter, people bought up our peaches, corn and tomatoes…the summer’s triple threat.
A good time was had by all.
Maybe I’m a cheapskate, but I really like designing and cutting my own Corn Maze each year. I know I could spend lots of money and have the Battle of Hastings or a portrait of Barak Obama designed professionally to fit my cornfield, with GPS coordinates provided and all that, but I’d still have to cut it myself. And don’t we already have enough digital in our lives? So every year I make the decision to do it all myself…well, with a lot of help from the summer crew. We all take ownership of the corn maze, and by the time we’ve finished sketching, measuring, cutting, running out of gas, sweltering in the July heat, we’ve got a corn maze with soul.
And one of my favorite corn maze devices is circles. Not as mysterious as crop circles, mind you, but often just as baffling. When a path through the corn maze comes to a circle, one is confronted with multiple options. Some lead nowhere. Others lead somewhere, but just not the right somewhere. And yes, one is the right path. At Ridgefield Farm, our corn maze always has lots of circles.cutting-the-corn-maze
But for some insane reason, my circles have to be perfectly formed. One kid stands in the middle with a tape measure, or rope, or sometimes a pole. Another holds the other end tightly at just the right measurement and walks in a circle around the first kid, thus maintaining a perfect radius. Cautiously, the person on the mower follows close behind. Ah, yes. Perfectly round! Perfectly done!
Don’t you just love to set off on a confounding path through a corn maze? The twist and turns. The false hopes dashed. You’re cookin’ now. You’ve gotten your stride. Oops! Drat! Another dead end. Now where was that turn I should have taken back there?
The corn is growing, (about knee-high now, though we’re well past the 4th of July!), and it’s definitely time to cut the paths for this year’s corn maze before it gets too tall and way too difficult to cut. We waited a bit too long once, and we found it very challenging and not particularly fun to chop our way through 5 acres of corn.
It’s hard for us to design our maze layout too far ahead, because when we do we often find Mother Nature sticking it to us again for trying to be efficient. Thin patches of corn that will clearly not grow high enough to conceal pathways predictably fall squarely on spots where a complicated juncture or a needed connection is planned.
So now it’s time. We can adjust our layout to accommodate those sections of recalcitrant corn. But it’s still a daunting task. Armed with graph paper, orange flags, and 300′ tape measures, we tromp all about the field double-checking each measurement, so the design we laboriously created on paper (and Excel spreadsheets!) can be transferred to a most irregularly shaped field. This we do during July’s most inhospitable heat.
Is it going to be difficult enough? Is it lame? That’s always been my greatest worry each PumpkinFest at the farm. Is everyone going to be able to race through it in 5 minutes? This year, I think not.
With the explosion of flowers in our cutting garden over the last week or so, dozens of moms have brought their kids to pick bouquets. The kids represent all ages and temperaments, from those ecstatic to pick flowers to the little ones who need naps, and most of them have a ball wandering around the maze of flower beds in search of the perfect color.
But we’ve been struck by the number of kids who, after spending quality time picking over thousands of flowers, announce “these are for my dad, and these are for my mom.”
We have limited pairs of scissors and baskets on hand for groups, (well, actually fewer and fewer scissors, as they seem to evaporate each season!), and we are seeing kids happily sharing theirs with their siblings and friends. No squabbles. No possession disputes.
We never imagined our flower garden could become the training laboratory for positive child behavior mechanisms. Sharing, generosity, giving, thoughtfulness. What powerful concepts to arise from a lovely day in the flower garden!
Feelin' tall after picking flowers