The annual Harvest Fun Day at 78th Street Heritage Farm was a chance to enjoy a range of down-home delights.
There were pumpkins to decorate and corn to shuck; carrots to dig and fiddles to play; farm wagons to ride and rockets to launch.
Yep, the rocket assembly center and firing range were right next to the llamas. That made it really handy for 4-H member Andrew Murray to duck back and forth at Saturday’s event in Hazel Dell.
Murray, 13, is a member of Alpaca 101, a 4-H group based in Battle Ground. As he and Dayna Hines, 12, were trying to interest Coco in a corn husk — the 4-year-old male alpaca was not interested — Murray said that he had tried his hand at building and launching a compressed-air rocket.
“It was lots of fun,” Murray said.
The annual event is put on by the Clark County Historical Museum. It collects food for the Clark County Food Bank, while giving families a chance to enjoy some traditional activities.
The 11th annual harv-fest also was a chance to celebrate the 100th anniversary of what is now Washington State University Extension.
At one busy area, Battle Ground residents Peggy and Ken Kirkman were tuned in as grandson Theodore Kirkman decorated a pumpkin with colored marking pens.
“It’s good for kids to see that food grows in the ground,” Peggy Kirkman said.
They don’t do much home gardening themselves, she added: “Only enough to feed the deer.”
“It’s a fun event,” Peggy Kirkman said. And, she noted, “It’s not electronic.”
A bit of the tech field was represented, however, in the rocket activity. It’s a new offering that is part of the 4-H organization’s science-technology-engineering-math (STEM) focus.
“It’s a fun activity,” said Rachel George, regional 4-H program coordinator.
“We always try bring STEM-related activities to 4-H. And it’s a fun way to put our name out there” to a public that doesn’t know the breadth of 4-H programs.
The rocket range was marked in 25-, 50- and 75-foot intervals. It sounds pretty ambitious for capped tubes of tightly rolled paper that are powered by a foot-pedal pump. It didn’t take a lot of hang time to have a good time, however.
“The level of difficulty is perfect,” said Karen Jozwiak. Her 4-year-old granddaughter, LiliAhna Schlitt was holding tight to the rocket she’d just retrieved.
“She also loved the tractor ride and corn on the cob,” Jozwiak said.
While LiliAhna didn’t have to go far to fetch her rocket, “Some of the older kids were getting them out to 100 feet,” George said.
After their initial efforts, a couple of boys even went back to the drawing board. They created makeshift nose cones to see if the additional streamlining would get their rockets a few more feet of distance.
“Doesn’t work,” George said.
