The last few weeks here at Guidestone’s headquarters have been packed! Beginning June 17-20 there was a true farmyard scene at the Hutchinson Homestead for Farmhands’ Animals on the Ranch Camp.
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| Delbert the donkey! |
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| Jasper leads the llamas through the pasture. |
First off, our 22 (!) campers got to meet a few residents already on the ranch, including Smoky and Bucky the horses, Delbert the ever-sociable donkey, and Stella the milk cow. Everybody had a chance to see these animals in action, whether by milking Stella or watching as Smoky got shod (thanks to local farrier Harry Hansen for that great show!). In addition to the ranch locals, we also had some visitors: Little Red and Bunny the pack llamas from Bill Gardiner at Antero Llamas, a duo of Boer meat goats from Ellen Kelly at El Regalo Ranch, a flock of young laying hens from Guidestone’s own Andrea Coen, and a pair of turkeys from the homestead of Leisa Glass. Whew! At the end of the week the kids had a solid sense of all the different animals on the ranch and their product – whether it be fiber, meat or dairy.
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| Campers meet the El Regalo’s boer kids. |
Perhaps the more important synthesis of the week’s activities was the kid’s gradual discovery that ranches provide a home not just for domestic animals, but also for a wide variety of wild critters that might not have a home if not for the landscape of the ranch. While out in the field we tuned our senses in to look for signs of wildlife, and boy did we find plenty! From the carcass of a red-tailed hawk, red-winged blackbird nests in the pasture, deer tracks, and beaver dams it seemed like everywhere we looked we saw evidence of a healthy ecosystem.
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| Laundry! Everybody’s favorite pastime. |
The good turnout continued the following week with 20 eager kids coming to the ranch to learn traditional homesteading skills during People on the Land. Over the course of the week camp participants got to try their hands at making butter, soap, and candles, spinning wool into bracelets, hand-washing laundry (who would’ve thought that’d be such a hit?), and even take a few swings at the blacksmith’s anvil when Jamie Monroe and his assistant Matt came to demonstrate how Annabel Hutchinson and company would’ve made their own tools in the late 1800s.
At week’s end, the general consensus among the group was that the hard work that would’ve been demanded of them as homesteader children would have been… hard! Perhaps the chores are fun in short doses, with all your buddies doing them with you, but in the end the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of modern conveniences.
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| Eager blacksmith apprentices. |
In addition to an appreciation for the austere elements of life in the homesteading era, the kids started to grasp the connection between every material aspect of their lives and the land they live on – from the butter that comes straight from a cow’s udder, the warm clothes spun from fiber-bearing animals, or the objects that populate their lives’ origins as materials mined from the earth. By seeing the whole cycle on a few of these simple products, the kids were able to, after some pronunciation lessons, identify their role in the cycle of producer-consumer-decomposer.
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| Farm-fresh soap! |
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| Reflection in the homestead. |
