Reply #56: Is there an active 4-H Club in your area? [View All]

[jmowreader]

The 4-H Club (the four H's are head, heart, hands and health) is the youth branch of the USDA's Cooperative Extension Service. When I was old enough to transfer from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts, I went into 4-H instead. In my hometown, 4-H was much more fun than Scouts.

4-H is much more specialized than Scouts. Scouting seeks to build the Whole Boy (or Whole Girl, if we're talking Girl Scouts) by exposing him/her to all sorts of different things. If you're in the 4-H Chicken program, you raise chickens and show them at the county fair. If you're in the 4-H Pleco Feeding program (better known as Gardening), you grow zucchini or cucumbers, display the nicest ones at the fair and feed the rest to your plecostomus catfish. (And then the next year, you display your foot-long plecostomus at the fair with a sign over him that says, "this is what happens when you join the Gardening club.") My local club's hog raising program started out every year with the Pig Scramble. There is a hog farmer in Plummer, Idaho, who donates piglets to the Benewah County 4-H club every spring. If you want to participate in the hog raising program, you are required to sign up for the Pig Scramble. They take the pigs to the fairgrounds, put all the kids who are participating in the horse dressage ring, then turn the pigs loose with them. You raise the one you catch. This is a big event in town--probably 800 people go to watch the fun. (St. Maries, Idaho, has a population of 2500.) At one time they even had a tobacco growing program. In Idaho. No one ever did it, mainly because there was one person in town who had the right soil for tobacco and he wasn't sharing, but if you were so inclined, you could grow tobacco as your project. What you don't do as a member of the pleco-feeding program is grow pleco food, raise pigs, sew a dress, study the local watershed...there is no rule saying you can't join multiple clubs if you wanted, and most of us did, but the cat program didn't go on overnight hikes.

When I was in 4-H there was no religious component to it--it's a federal government program, so there couldn't be until George W. "Jesus He Knows Me" Bush got installed. There are boys and girls in the same clubs. There are no uniforms. Dues are minimal and paid once a year. It's fairly cheap to be in 4-H; what it costs depends on what your program is--pig growing is more expensive than hair styling.

I am going to talk to the county extension service about being a woodworking or construction volunteer. It should be fun.

Check out http://www.4-h.org.