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SHAVERTOWN — Slurp, slurp, slurp.
As I held my hand in a pail of milk, a tiny calf, less than a week old, sucked on my fingers and lapped up nourishment at the same time.
Helping that little creature have breakfast, feeling the soft tug of her hungry mouth, was a sweet moment.
But for action-packed excitement, nothing beat my recent Saturday afternoon at Adult Farm Camp. That’s when I helped hold a squirming sheep named Lamb Chop while The Lands at Hillside Farms’ education director, Lindsey Sutton, injected her with de-worming medicine.
“You’ve got to do this. For the story,” fellow camper Neil Vesek, of Harrisburg, said as he handed Lamb Chop’s forelegs over to me. The sheep lay on her back, flailing every which way, while I secured her head between my shins and hoped for the best.
“She won’t bite,” someone reassured me.
The ewe didn’t bite. Whew! She didn’t kick anyone, either, though she may have wanted to.
And Vesek, who a few minutes earlier held down an alpaca for a similar innoculation, was right. I had to make the most of my day on the farm so I could write about it.
Actually, maybe I should say “our farm.” As marketing director Suzanne Kapral Kelly explained to some 15 Adult Farm Camp participants shortly after our 6:15 a.m. arrival, the farm is a non-profit entity devoted to sustainability and education. “It belongs to everyone.”
At 6:30 a.m., some of us met Hillside employee Cecil Martin, who showed us how to hook up the four cups of a milking machine to a cow’s udder and, when the milking was done, how to clean the cow’s nipples with an iodine dip that turned them blue.
We took turns doing that as well as feeding scoops of grain to the cows. Then a few of us “raked” the area, pulling cow manure into a trough.
“It wasn’t as disgusting as I thought it would be,” camper Jessica Cashner, of Shickshinny, said of the cow pies, which would eventually be used as fertilizer.
Around 9:30 a.m., Martin brought the milked cows out of the barn so they could walk to the pasture and spend the day eating grass. Staff and campers held ropes across (busy) Hillside Road and (less busy) Church Road while I held a stop sign. Motorists stopped, thank goodness, and allowed several dozen cows to cross.
Two bulls were part of the herd, and the older male is the father of all the recent calves. Mating takes place naturally in the field, Sutton said, whenever the animals follow their instincts.
Once the cows were safely in the pasture, we turned our attention to chickens, gathering dozens of mostly brown eggs and carrying them in wire baskets to the “egg house.” Here, camper Laura Foord, a lawyer from New Jersey, did the yeoman’s share of loading eggs onto a conveyor that took them through a cleaning machine.
Vesek, Heather Chulick, of Dallas, and I devoted ourselves to drying the eggs while Vesek’s wife, Dr. Jennifer Bau, packed them into cartons and marked the date. The eggs sell fast in Hillside’s dairy store, Kelly said, and they’re packed with nutrition because the chickens are free range, meaning they’re not kept in cages but able to roam about, peck in the soil and feel the sun.
Treated to a tractor-pulled wagon ride, we campers ate bag lunches from home and then admired the small herd of hardy beef cattle grazing on a grassy hill. “They’re the best kind of beef you can eat,” Kelly said, noting they’re “100 percent grass-fed.”
Around 2:30, rainclouds gathered as a dozen campers — people who ordinarily work as a pharmacist, hairstylist, radiologist, teacher, chemical engineer or in insurance, information technology or communications — herded one sheep and two alpacas into a small enclosure, mostly by blocking them with our bodies as they tried to run away.
It was raining as Sutton vaccinated the trio and trimmed the alpacas’ hooves. Lamb Chop didn’t need her hooves trimmed because she’s so active she wears them down.
The rain subsided by the time we guided the cows back across the roads into the barn and performed our final chore — unrolling plastic sheeting in a field and spreading straw on top of it to discourage weeds. Ten hours into my farm experience, I was tired — and marveling at campers who still seemed to have energy.
“Look at Jessica go,” Bau said as Cashner — her sister, who teaches in the Greater Nanticoke Area School District, — pulled another heavy wagonload of straw mulch over the rutty ground where vegetables would be planted.
Finally, around 5:00, we were cleaned up and helping dietitian Clancy Cash Harrison prepare a chocolate dessert — using Hillside Farms cream, of course — plus dressings for an array of salads. The meal started with hearty kale soup, and campers and staff dug in with relish, eating off china at a grand table in Hillside’s 36-room “cottage,” once the summer home of the wealthy Conyngham family.
My day at Hillside ended close to 14 hours after it started, with a few of us so refreshed by dinner, we insisted on washing dishes.
The entire experience had been exhausting, but exhilarating. My advice? If you have a chance for a hands-on adventure at this farm that belongs to everybody, go for it.
