According to certain calendars, 19th January is popcorn day. So, of course we had to celebrate at Families Go Wild, farm-style!

We started off by lighting up the rocket stove. We scrunched up pieces of paper, laid small pieces of wood on top, and lit the paper, in order to start the fire. As it got going, we added more wood to make it hotter.

While the stove heated up, we went to collect some herbs to make a herbal tea to go with our popcorn! We walked over to the sensory garden, where we picked sage and rosemary to go in our tea.

One of our family volunteers requested that we put some lemonbalm in the tea as well, so we searched for it in the kitchen garden and found some! We washed the herbs that we harvested and put them in the teapot to infuse later.

Once we had collected the herbs, we had to heat up some water! We filled up the Kelly Kettle and lit another fire to boil the water. When it had boiled, we poured it on the herbs and let them infuse. We added a little honey to the tea and sat down and enjoyed it together.

It took a while for the rocket stove to heat up for us to cook the popcorn. We had a lot of fun adding wood to the fire and watching it burn.

For some reason, only some of the corn kernels popped. Perhaps the stove wasn’t hot enough, or maybe we used too much oil. We decided to make some more popcorn on the gas stove instead, as we had waited a long time for the first batch to pop. While we were making the popcorn, we learned what makes popcorn pop, and we pretended to be the water inside the corn, bubbling, and bursting out of the kernel, making it explode!

The popcorn that we made was perfect, according to our family volunteers - not too sweet, and not too salty. All in all, it was a Happy Popcorn Day!