Farm & Wilderness Blog

Haying, Building, & More - Farm & Wilderness

Written by Andrea Breen | July 15, 2019

Tamarack Farm is in full swing. So many things happen at camp it is hard to figure out where to even begin.

I will start by saying on Monday we are about to have our fourth day of haying. We will have packed our barn for the winter with over 1000 bales of hay by the end of the day tomorrow. It is quite a sight to see Tamarack Farm campers in the fields, on the tractors, moving hay, and laughing while they do it.

The Skills Crews are accomplishing an incredible amount of work. The Art Barn porch is looking awesome and campers have built several needed stools for different areas of camp. The Art Skills Crew has created one mural and is about to start on a second. The Kitchen Crew has baked delicious bread, made the entire camp breakfast for dinner, helped one of our cooks make Tlacoyos from Mexico for lunch and made lunches for the kids living at Tamarack Farm but attending the day camp (the children of some of our staff).

The community has wrestled with how to create the most inclusive and comfortable community we can with so many different people with different expectations. We have played in the rain and canoed across the lake. The cows are being milked twice a day and for the most part the campers who have signed up for 6 am barn chores are showing up. Campers have helped us run the Barn Day Camp farmstand and we had our first farmer’s market up the road in Killington, Vermont.

Saturday night we had our “sex night.” This evening included conversations on relationships at camp, consent, decision-making, understanding our own values and some hard facts on STIs and bodies. It was engaging (and at times funny) as our teens had great questions.