Our Day on the Farm
My kids want a farm so bad, they have been “studying” all the YouTube videos they can find of farmers and homesteaders. They follow their Instagrams and refer to them all by name. They’ve learned how to slaughter and birth a cow (Yikes), how to plant crops and harvest them, and how to catch frogs and fry up their legs. So, when they saw that my photography had taken me to “A REAL-LIFE FARM!” they were more than jealous.
Senate Candidate Crystal Diamond and Cole Viramontes discussing watermelon business.
So when we had the opportunity to head back down south for the weekend, there was no way we were going to be able to do it without stopping by the real-life watermelon farm. Luckily for us, the Viramontes family, 3rd generation produce Farmers here in New Mexico, welcomed us to their farm and taught us, city people, so much about where our food comes from and the importance of buying local. If you don’t already follow their Instagrams I completely recommend it. I’ll link them below. Your kids will learn so much from them.
I read an article one time about Americans not knowing where their food comes from and having very low agricultural literacy. It was something about people thinking that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. I was determined to make sure my kids knew where food comes from, even if Doug won’t let us buy a farm and grow it ourselves.
Also, during this pandemic, when food purchases were limited, I realized so much about New Mexico and how vital our farmers truly are to our economy and our well-being and how important it is to buy local. I learned that we all need to be advocating for our food and agriculture because it is essential to life.
Okay so are you ready to see some pretty cool pictures of our trip to the farm? We had so much fun! My kids are more fired up now than they ever have been to live on a farm.
We saw the truck scale, the fields, and the tractors and could’ve died happy with just that, but there was still so much more to see.
It had rained the few days before we arrived so harvesting wasn’t happening while we were there, but Ms. Jaimie gave us an awesome tour and taught us about male watermelons.
After we toured the shed, we went out into the fields, which were so amazing. Because it was so hot, (I discovered that first hand when I got heat stroke the first time I visited), the Viramontes family planted a family style garden with; corn, cantaloupe, green beans, and cucumbers, in addition to their regular crops of green chile, pumpkin, watermelon and onions. Then they shared them ALL with us. We had so much fun, eating and sharing the food we picked straight from the farm.
Then there was this really cute time in the hotel room, where my kids needed to eat their freshly harvested cantaloupe, so we had to go to the store to buy a knife and a cutting board. They saved the seeds so they could plant them in our garden next year, only they didn’t clean them very well so they started to grow in the jar.
Oh! I almost forgot to tell you, while we were shopping for our cantaloupe knife, we found the watermelons from the watermelon farm we visited. My homeschool mama’s heart couldn’t have been any happier at how that turned out, even if I planned it myself.
A huge thank you, to Jaime Viramontes for being so generous with her time and amazing farm and for allowing us one of the best hands-on learning experiences of the year.
https://www.instagram.com/redmountainproduce/ for Jamie and https://www.instagram.com/viramontes_farms/ for Cole.