Poppet Loves Farming

Poppet lived right in the heart of a magical land called Farm Town. Some people call the place where she lives a virtual reality, which is another way of saying that it isn’t actually real, but I can tell you that Farm Town is a real place and poppet is a real girl, as real as you or I. I can tell you this because I know her well.

Poppet’s Patch is the name of her main farm; this is where she lives. You can see her house, it’s the one with the big yellow seeder parked outside on the driveway. Poppet Loves farming, so much so that she now owns five farms. Every morning she wakes early and goes out to check her livestock and crops. The very first thing that she does is to find out if her animals are ready to be harvested, she has oodles of them, cows, goats, hens, sheep and lamas. Some of the animals are free to roam and graze in the paddocks, which are dotted around the edge of her farm. Others, because she has so many, stay inside their houses. All the animals are well looked after and happy. Every morning and evening the milk and eggs need collecting, you can see in the picture that on this particular morning the chickens were 100% ready, waiting to be harvest. Some flowers were also ready for picking, in Farm Town also called harvesting, but none of the trees on Poppet’s Patch were ready. Harvesting the livestock just takes a ‘click’ of her fingers, the flowers do take longer BUT the job that takes all of Poppet’s time is harvesting the many different crops that she grows on each of her farms.

As I said Poppet loved farming. She had other things that she also loved to do and one of these was making tables and charts. She loved to write things down; well she had to really, it would have been impossible to keep up with all of her harvesting work without them. So every day when she left her house she took her list, pen and clipboard, which was pink and glittery, with her.

As poppet visited each farm she made a note on her list of everything that was ready for harvesting: Poppet’s Too (she named her farm like this when she only had two farms, it was her little play on words, Poppet’s Patch and this farm too!) had trees and flowers that were ready; on farm three the harvest of pumpkins and broccoli were ready for harvest, so were masses and masses of trees; farm four had trees, flowers and crops; finally, she arrived at farm five where everything also needed to be harvested.

There are lots of special, magical tools in farm Town that you can use to help you improve your farm, make farming easier and earn extra cash. Poppet already had most of these, she was known by her friends as a Greenery Giant. There were also a few really truly special things that not many other farmers knew about; one of these was called ‘layering’. Besides farming Poppet also owned factories. The factories used the crops from the farms to produce many other things that could then be sold at the Farm Town Market. Keeping the factories busy was another full time job, as if one weren’t enough! Layering was like multi-storey farming and I will tell you more about that later.

Look at how Poppet completed her chart.

1	2	3	4	5
F	T/F	T/F	T	T/F
H		H	H	H
P		P	P

· What do you think that the letters mean?

· If you came to live in Farm Town like Poppet would you make charts like the ones that she uses?

One of the best things about living in Farm Town, as far as Poppet was concerned, was that it was a social community, a place where fellow farmers helped each other. Poppet had lived there for some time now and so she had quite a lot of friends. A special friend ‘Blue’ had moved away some time ago, Poppet missed her visited her farm from time to time to water the flowers and clear away leaves. She so wished that Blue would come home again, they used to farm together every day it was fun, but she had gone to a place called Frontierville. Now Poppet really did think this was one of those virtual reality places because she had tried to visit her Blue and another friend Clive there once but couldn’t find any sign of the place no matter how hard she searched. With a sigh Poppet glanced down at the chart she had just completed. . . Goodness me, she thought to herself I do have a hard day’s work ahead of me better go and see who’s around and off she went.