You may not want to spend $332 a night to sleep in a tent, cook your own food and toss haybales onto a wagon on a hot afternoon. But then, you're not from New York City, and a "haycation", probably looks more like regular life to you than an exotic getaway from the urban confines of the Big Apple.

Kim Severson, a reporter for the New York Times, did plunk down her $332 times three for a long weekend stay at Stony Creek Farm in Delaware County, New York. It's in a part of the Catskills with ground so rocky that locals say there are two stones to every dirt.

Farm vacations are much more popular in Europe than they are in the U.S., so when they decided to get into the farm vacation business, Stony Creek's owners, Kate and Dan Marsiglio, hooked up with Feather Down Farms, a high-end European farm-stay chain. Feather Down provides the marketing for the franchisees, and the tents, which are comfortable, spacious, have flush toilets and showers. And well-stocked kitchens. More than half the the guest fees are turned over to Feather Down.

Any extras that guests pay for at Stony Creek stay at Stony Creek. The Marsiglios, for example, have a small farm store on site, where guests pay for everything but eggs. Eggs are free. And since Ms Seversen wanted to putter around in the garden, they let her pick some carrots and beets that they'd later sell at a farmers market. And they only charged her $35 for the privilege.

Which means she dug up the beets and the carrots and gave them, along with $35, to the Marsiglios. They did, however, let her pitch bales for free.

I'm planning to contact Ms Severson to ask her if she would like to get a taste of life in a small Pennsylvnia town, where she can mow a lawn, prune some bushes, wash a car and cook in a genuine small-town kitchen. For a fee, of course.

And if she wants to walk the dog...well, that would be extra.

If you'd like to read her account, you'll find it here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/dining/26farms.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Master Gardeners are helping young people in trouble by teaching them how to get their hands dirty. In a program that's in its eighth year, the Lancaster Master Gardeners visit twice a week with the young people housed in the Lancaster Youth Intervention Center. The goal is to help the struggling kids get closer to the earth and, hopefully, closer to themselves and to society at large. Anne Harnish, Lancaster Farming food and family features editor, paid a visit to the Center and came back with some interesting photos and a story which appears in Section B of the current edition.

What if every bird in your layer house could do this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWh_2Iit3Ek