Veggie lovers: grab your trowels, spades, and watering cans. Warm weather’s here and it’s time to make delicious things grow.
In Miss MacDonald Has a Farm by Kalee Gwarjanski and Elizabet Vuković (Doubleday BFYR, 2024), we’re all invited to tag along with busy Miss MacDonald as she cultivates, harvests, and then cooks colorful crops of healthy, flavorful produce. With a pick-pick here, and a shuck-shuck there, she takes us from seed to table with hard work, patience, and careful tending.
Debut author Gwarjanski’s upbeat female-centric spin on the traditional “Old MacDonald” song, with its rhythmic, rollicking text, is equally fun to sing or read aloud. Since the verse scans so well, those familiar with the song will likely find it hard to resist vocalizing, especially with the jaunty tagline “E-I-E-I-GROW.”
So what is Miss MacDonald actually growing? Lettuce, peas, tomatoes, green beans, zucchini, potatoes, corn and pumpkins. She begins by planting lettuce:
Miss MacDonald has a farm.
She loves things that grow.
And on that farm,
she has some lettuce.
E-I-E-I-GROW
With a seed-seed here
and a sow-throw there,
here it shoots, there it sprouts,
everywhere it sprout-sprouts.
Miss MacDonald has a farm.
She loves things that grow.
(I can hear you singing!) 🙂
She then goes on to complete a different task for each of the other vegetables: waters her peas, weeds her tomato plants, picks her green beans, prunes her zucchini, hills her potatoes, shucks her corn, and finally washes and cans her pumpkins.
Jama's Alphabet Soup 