Highland Park is technically an independent town, but as a first-circle suburb of Detroit, Michigan, there’s not much to the city beyond the urban sprawl of the Detroit metro area. Once upon a time, Highland Park was a farming community, but those days are long since passed. Still, if Highland Park residents want to get a feel for that old farming life, there are organizations and destinations in the Detroit area that let people experience life in the open fields.
“You Pick” Farms
Visit any grocery store and you’ll see crates and shelves full of produce. However, fruits and vegetables have to survive several days or weeks on conveyor belts, sitting in warehouses and big trucks, and then sitting some more in a grocery store. To make it through that long journey, farmers often harvest unripe crops that then ripen during the journey.
However, there’s a way to get the freshest, ripest fruits and vegetables available in your area. They’re called “You Pick” farms, or else “U Pick” or “U Pick ‘Em.” At places like the Long Family Orchard northwest of Detroit, the owners let visitors pick their own apples, strawberries, or pumpkins. Other area farms have berry patches for visitors to gather blueberries, raspberries, cherries, and more. In fact, Destiny Farm has plots for well over a dozen kinds of plants.
Heritage Park Petting Farm
Down in Taylor, they have the Heritage Park Petting Farm, and it sits right next to the Taylor Conservatory and Botanical Gardens. By visiting the petting farm, you and the kids can practice being comfortable around bigger and heavier animals. You can also meet smaller farm animals in the Big Red Barn. The petting farm is a year-round attraction, and thanks to its heated barn, it can keep its livestock and its visitors warm during the cold months.
Buckets of Rain
Buckets of Rain is a nonprofit project aimed at replacing decaying houses and other signs of urban blight with vegetable gardens that can feed the surrounding communities. This is particularly important because the people who still live in decaying neighborhoods will often lack basic utilities like garbage pickup, electricity, and even water pressure. All that makes it harder for residents to keep fresh produce for very long, so converting old backyards and fallen logs into vegetable gardens is more important now than ever. Plus if you volunteer to tend the garden, you’ll get a very farm-like experience.
With the city limits far past the borders of Highland Park, Michigan, the residents here and in other parts of the Detroit metro don’t know what it’s like to work on a small farm. That’s why they often seek out opportunities that include picking fresh produce right off the vines and the branches, interacting with the barnyard animals at a petting zoo, or creating practical vegetable gardens in areas affected by urban blight. Between all these different opportunities, a person who lives in Highland Park can pick up plenty of farm experiences even if they work in an office building.
Image via Flickr by Ula Gillion used under CC By 2.0
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