We brought the camper this year and stayed on the grounds for all five days of the Salem County Fair. Five days of show mornings, late nights walking back to the camper with a sleeping kid over a shoulder, and more fair food than any of us will admit to.
What we did not escape was the milking.
Dairy goats don’t care that you’re at the fair. They need milking twice a day, every day, on schedule, and so we drove home and back twice a day for five straight days. Morning milking, then back to the fairgrounds. Evening milking, then back again. If you saw our truck on Route 40 at odd hours last week, that was us.
It rained. A lot. If you were there, you know.
We’d do the whole thing again tomorrow.
Our Cloverbud had the time of their life
The soap ribbons are nice, but they’re not what we’ll remember about this fair.
Our Cloverbud showed across three different 4-H clubs this year — rabbits, goats, and poultry — and came home with an armful of ribbons. We are still finding them. One turned up in the camper silverware drawer.
If you’ve never watched a Cloverbud show an animal, it’s a particular kind of wonderful. The animal is usually bigger than they expected. The ring is definitely bigger than it looked from outside. And somewhere in there a very small person decides they’ve got it handled, squares their shoulders, and walks a goat around a ring in front of a judge like it’s the most ordinary thing in the world.
Rabbits were the main event. That’s where most of the entries went and where most of the week was spent — carriers hauled back and forth, nails trimmed the night before, coats gone over one more time in case a judge looked closer than expected. Rabbit showmanship asks a lot of a small handler. You have to pose the animal, handle it confidently, and answer questions about it, all while it has its own opinions about the whole arrangement.
We brought exactly one chicken, and she was not one of our working birds. She’s a Mille Fleur d’Uccle — a bantam, feathered feet, that speckled thousand-flowers pattern she’s named for. Our heritage flock earns its keep laying eggs and none of them have ever been asked to stand still and look pretty. The d’Uccle was bred for exactly that, and she knew it.
Three species in five days is a lot to keep straight for anyone. Different showmanship for each, different handling, different grooming the night before. Ours kept it all straight better than we did.
The soap swept the podium
We entered ten bars in handmade soap. There were three ribbons to give out. All three came home with us.
- First Place — Oats, Milk and Honey, our exfoliating bar
- Second Place — Jersey Pine Barrens
- Third Place — Lily of the Valley
We did not expect that. You bring a stack of bars hoping one of them catches a judge’s eye — not that you’ll take every ribbon on the table. The other seven went home unribboned and we’re still fond of them.
All ten were made the same way every bar here is made: cold process, small batch, with fresh milk from our own Nigerian Dwarf herd about forty feet from where the soap cures.
The nice thing about a county fair judging is that it isn’t marketing. Nobody’s looking at your label. Somebody who knows soap picks up your bar, looks at it, smells it, and decides. That’s worth more to us than most things we could say about ourselves.
If you want to try the winners, all three are in the shop and all three are stocked — Jersey Pine Barrens just came off the curing rack.
And then there’s the tomato
First place, Ugliest Vegetable.
It was a tomato. We’d like to be clear that we did not set out to grow it. It simply happened, the way these things do, in a corner of the garden we weren’t paying attention to. By the time we found it, it had committed so thoroughly to being unattractive that it seemed disrespectful not to enter it.
The judges agreed. Blue ribbon.
It is, as of this writing, the only blue ribbon on this farm that came from something we did wrong.
What those five days were actually about
Camping on the grounds changed the fair for us, milk runs and all. When you drive in for your class and leave, you see your own events and go home. When you stay, you end up in a folding chair at nine at night talking to the family two spots over about their steers, and you learn things, and your kids run around with their kids until somebody falls over.
That’s the part that mattered. The Salem County Fair has been doing this for a long time, and there’s a reason people keep showing up in the rain.
Thank you to the 4-H leaders who spent those five days in wet barns helping small kids handle animals patiently and well. Thank you to the judges. And thank you to everyone who stopped by to talk soap, ask about the goats, or tell us about their own herd.
We’ll be back next year. The camper’s already earning its keep.