U-Pick Your Fights, U-Pick Your Fruits

Farmer Andy Griffin has a thing or two to say about getting your hands dirty

My theory on child raising was simple: throw them in the tub at the end of the day and call it good. My kids grew up on the farm; they were surrounded by dirt.

When they were little, their mother, my late wife, Julia, was dealing with her first bout with breast cancer. I had the kids with me in the field while she was off at the hospital getting treatments, or at home recuperating.

I’d be working with the crew for most of the day so the children would be more or less unsupervised. We did have some rules:

• Stay out of the poison oak.

• Don’t drink from puddles.

• Don’t play with harvest knives or propane weed burners.

• No turning on the tractor.

• Don’t pick up anything dead.

• No throwing rocks, sticks, dirt clods, tomatoes or zucchinis at each other.

• Always walk down the rows in the wheel track, not on the raised bed where the crop plants are.

• Don’t leave your clothes in the field.

I know it seems like a pretty strict regimen, but they survived. Until one day we had a tomato U-Pick on the far…