From Our Farm to Yours: June Activities You Love

This blog space is for the activities you're trying on your farm that may not be beautifully formatted, but nonetheless, connect learners to your farm and the joy of discovering the many species who call it home. We aim to share an activity or two each month, to collectively build a calendar of favorites. While our growing zones and crops may differ, we all can learn from each other's experiences. Want to share something? Send it to Vera, along with your farm name, city, state/province, and be sure to include the ages of participants for the activity and what you love about it. vsimonnobes@shelburnefarms.org. (Photo: AllAboutBirds.org)

June 2026

At Cedar Circle Farm in East Thetford, Vermont, educators Zack Herman and Elly Thomas have been teaching about crops in their education garden. Here's an activity that's been working particularly well with their homeschool group (ages 5-11yo), who visit the farm weekly.  

What Do You Want to Grow? Giving Students Agency to Select their Own Crops. 

In February we gave our students seed catalogs to select what crops they wanted to grow in our 8x4ft bed. We started with the 'big list' -- we wrote down anything the kids wanted, from bananas to cucumbers and watermelon, to tomatoes and grapefruit, then narrowed our list down to things we can grow in our growing zone, and then again down to things we can grow in early season, then further and further down the list to select things that could be grown together in a small garden bed. Once we had narrowed our list, the students took to the 'books' and selected which varieties of each crop they wanted to grow - we wound up with lettuce, broccoli, peas and kale. We put in our order, received our seeds and set about starting them in our greenhouse. Each week following our seeding we measured our plants growth and kept track of our data, and graphed our results! The plants are currently happily growing in our raised bed.

Becoming a Hummingbird!

At Cedar Circle Farm, Educator Kelsey Head and Elly Thomas have been teaching about birds on the farm. Here's an activity that's been working particularly well with their younger learners (2-5yos), for a drop in class called Little Farmers.

We gathered our Little Farmers on our veggie blanket and showed them a photo of a Ruby Throated hummingbird (our native hummer) and noticed the bird's ruby throat together. Using a magic wand, we transformed ourselves into Ruby Throated hummingbirds and each kid received a red bandana to tie around their neck. We asked "hummingbirds are you hungry?!" This time of year humming birds are surprisingly eating mostly bugs! We took the flock of hummers on a bug hunt in our flower garden pretending to eat bugs that we found. After our 'bug dinner', we fast forwarded time into mid summer when hummmingbirds are seek more nectar than protein, and took to our greenhouses to make our own nectar (this part of the activity was a bit of a stretch, but so much fun). In the greenhouses we had pre-selected 4 packs of violets that needed to be dead headed, and asked our hummingbirds to help pick the wilted, purple flowers - we added the violets to hot water and continued our search for flowers to pollinate while the water was steeping. When we returned (5 minutes later) the water had turned a deep purple/blue. Then the magic happens when you add lemon juice (be sure to have all of the kids watching) as the purple /blue turns a shocking bright pink! Add a small amount of maple syrup and voila! You've made violet pink lemonade for your hummers to drink and pretend they're slurping up nectar from flowers. 

Fun facts / variations for older groups:

- pass around a penny. This is the average weight of a hummingbird!

- pass around a quarter. This is the average size opening of a hummingbird nest (show a picture of a hummingbird nest)

- let kids know that hummingbirds select flowers with a specific ratio of sugar (20% - 25%) because anything more is too viscous for them to slurp up! (honeybees like 50% sugar! That's a lot of sugar! For context, coke is 10% sugar!)

- Violets are a pH indicator! Use the violet steeped water to do a deeper dive into acidity and alkalinity before drinking your pink lemonade.