One of my enduring memories of childhood is of trapsing over paddocks, up and down hills, in gumboots too big for my feet picking mushrooms or blackberries. Eventually getting sore heels and aching legs. Eventually filling buckets and ice-cream containers with food.
Probably scrapping with my sisters. Probably moaning about having to do so. Definitely covered in blackberry juice and scratches on blackberry days. Definitely not impressed by having to pick mushrooms, which I didn’t like to eat.
This summer holiday, my boys got to harvest their own food. Not blackberries and mushrooms, though. They got to harvest seafood.
Tuatua (too-ah-too-ah) are a shellfish. The children love to collect them. We go out at almost low-tide or just after low-tide in thigh-high water. We do the Twist. Our feet sink into the wet sand and feel around for something hard. When we find one, we reach down and pick it up with our hands.
Sometimes, we are side-swiped by a wave. Sometimes, we pick up a round hard sea-biscuit instead. At times, instead of the Tuatua-Twist there is a Crab-Bite-Leap with occasional bad-language. There is almost always laughter and a competition to see who can find the most. This year, the boys and their cousins also took responsibility for collecting fresh seawater twice a day, to keep the Tuatuas in, while they spat out all the sand inside their shells. They kept them cool in the fridge and, when they were finally cooked, the children ate them: some with gusto, others not so much. To me, they taste a bit like chewy seawater…
Our eldest son, 12 year-old Joe, with his 13 year-old girl cousin, Billie, trapped their own crayfish.
Crayfish are related to rock-lobster and, in our extended family, are usually trapped off-shore and by boat, or dived for with scuba-gear and tanks. Joe and Billie had kayaked out around a small peninsula and discovered an old craypot on the rocks. They dragged it out of the sea and managed to convince their fathers to repair it. They then kayaked it out again and dropped it on a good rocky spot.
Each day they went out to check their pot, just as the adults do the other craypots. The first day they caught – seawater. The second day they caught – seawater. The third day they were a bit fed up and otherwise occupied, so didn’t go out. The fourth day or maybe it was the fifth, Billie was out fishing and Joe went out alone to see what was there and to bring the pot in for good. He was very excited to discover they had caught a legal-sized cray! Yes, duly cooked and eaten.
In these days where many children don’t know that carrots grow in the ground or that their meat comes from a real animal, I love that our boys are sometimes involved in the process of food-collection and the processes of preparing it for a meal. I know that these are the Good Old Days and these moments will create some of their childhood memories.
Do your children do similar things you did as a child? Are they involved in collecting or harvesting their own food?
This is an original post to World Moms Blog from our writer in New Zealand and mum of three boys, Karyn Van Der Zwet.
The image used in this post is credited to the author.
I love this post. I thinks are so awesome when they get out and about and getting involved in the process of food collection and even preparing it for a meal.
I am now trying to get my littlest ones back with nature. Food collection may be a far catch for us, but who knows…
My earliest years were on a tropical island. So many things have changed…my kids don’t do anything even similar to what I did growing up.
Isn’t it amazing how things change from generation to generation?
Tell me more about this tropical island? (I’m envious!)
I love this post Karyn! Sometimes I wish I could get the kids out to catch their own food…. but alas, living in a small apt in the middle of NYC that doesn’t work very well. We do, however grow our own herbs, which the kids love to eat right off the plant :-). We had an experiment of trying to grow tomatoes and carrots in small window planters last year. The tomatoes never grew, even though we had (and still have) quite a huge vine, and the carrots have been growing but are still quite small (the kids have slowly been pulling them out of the pot though, to see if they are any bigger – and end up eating them each time…. i think there may only be 3 or 4 left in the plant – LOL). It has been so much fun making these grow from a small seed to edible creations (even if it is a small amount) with the kids. On a side note, we used to grow jalapenos and other hot peppers in those same planters, but we stopped as soon as small toddler fingers came along 🙂
Yes, hot peppers and small hands don’t really go together, do they? LOL
I love that you have window planters and the children eat straight from them. My Dad tells a story about his mother (who had an amazing vege garden) refusing to plant peas any more, because he, at four, used to hide among the peavines and eat the lot!
What a wonderful post! With your retelling, I felt like I was there too. Very fun! We don’t do much harvesting, but we have gone blueberry picking. My husband is a novice fisherman, and hopefully he and our kids can learn more about this together. I’ll let you know how our meals turn out 😉
Oh fishing with kids is awesome! Please do let me know how it all goes. 😀
And wild blueberries….yum, no such luck here in New Zealand!
Right now Owl’s life isn’t too different from mine growing up – except for all the Angry BIrds, that is. But when we lived in the Caribbean I swam daily, snorkelled… I want to take him to Curacao and show him the fish…
Oh yes! And please take me too!
When I was about 10 years old my sister and I were sent to spend a couple of weeks on a working farm. Got to milk cows, churn butter by hand and do other wholesome farm things. It was an awesome experience and we learnt a lot – especially because the farm family only spoke Afrikaans and my sister and I only spoke English! 🙂
A family tradition of ours is to go pick cherries once a year … and (after we’ve eaten as many as we can handle) we make cherry jam! 🙂
Karyn — so interesting! I grew up close to the shore. Many of my friends fished, but we never did. My family did, however, grow vegetables every summer.
I keep up the vegetable garden tradition, and it is hard work in and out of summer days, but so worth it! I love when the girls pick their own corn and are there eating it in the garden, while I’m weeding. Or when we need a squash for dinner, and we all go straight to the garden to pick one. Or, I can send them out to pick some basil leaves. They really enjoy it, and they look forward to helping to choose what we grow!
Jen 🙂
Mine our picking brussels sprouts in my vegetable patch while I’m writing this! The little one doesn’t really like their taste, but she does like to pick them and by doing so, she is a tiny bit more interested in eating them. We also have a LOT of apples and she likes to take one bite out of every one she finds… And the berries, well they don’t often make it to the kitchen…
*are*