It’s hard to ignore all of the pick-your-own and farm-stand fresh berries this time of year. They seem to shout, “Look at me! I’m beautiful! Take me home!” Tennessee strawberries burst onto the scene in National Strawberry Month in May and are followed eagerly by our succulent blackberries, plump blueberries, and sweet ruby red (and black and gold) raspberries. The berry love affair has several months to blossom. Our ample growing season yields rich opportunities for fresh-picked goodness and culinary creativity.

When visiting a berry patch, pick the ripest berries. If you have to tug at them, they are not ready. Berries don’t ripen after picking like some fruits. Eat them, bake with them, freeze them or make preserves with them quickly. They set the terms on readiness and flirt briefly with our taste buds.

Strawberries
These heart-shaped gems should not have any pale green or white tops or tips. Buy them red. Eat them red. Remember that strawberries are porous. They absorb water like a sponge. Gently rinse them just before eating. Refrigerate them until that quick rinse. Related Recipe: Overnight French Toast With Mixed Berries

Blackberries
Blackberries ripen in June through August all across the state. Ripe blackberries are so full of juice that they look like they’re ready to pop. They are rich in vitamins B and C. It is true that chiggers will eat your ankles as eagerly as you eat the blackberries when picking. Ardent devotes endure this test. Related Recipe: Wilted Spinach Salad With Blackberries, Goat Cheese and Warm Balsamic Vinaigrette

Raspberries
Candy-sweet raspberries are a great source of fiber and vitamin C. They also ripen in that mid-summer window. Be certain to inspect any pre-picked batches. The bottom berries are easily crushed and tend to mold. Related Recipe: Raspberry Lime Tart

Blueberries
When picking them, you should be able to gently run your hand under these bouncy berries and catch them in a basket. They ripen in early summer until fall. Related Recipe: Grilled Chicken Thighs With Blueberry Salsa

Freezing Berries
If freezing berries, rinse them carefully in a colander. Place them on paper towels and drain well. Next, place them in a single layer on a jellyroll pan, and put the pan in the freezer. When hardened, they can be placed in freezer bags or plastic containers for about three months. Thawed berries can still be very nice in sauces and in baking. They do tend to weep. Maybe that’s because they miss the sweetness of summer.

Bonus Berry Recipe: Lamb Chops With Berry Mint Sauce

Here are a few places that offer ziplining in Tennessee.

Adventure Works
Kingston Springs, TN
(615) 297-2250

RiverView Mounds Farm
Clarksville, TN
(931) 624-1095

Foxfire Mountain
Sevierville, TN
(865) 453-1998

Smoky Mountain Ziplines
Gatlinburg, TN
(865) 429-9004

Ocoee Canopy Tour
Ducktown, TN
(888) 723-8663

A city-girl-turned-farm-wife, 35-year-old Whitney Tilley has a fresh perspective on what it means to be a farmer.
“I feel like farming is a calling,” Tilley says. “You don’t do it to get rich or because it’s fun all the time, but to be happy and content – there’s no other option. As soon as Travis and I got married I knew it was what fit my life and it excites me still.”

The Tilleys farm beef cattle and hay in the Midway community of Roane County with their four children, Charli, 13, Cole, 10, Stella, 8, and Silas, 6.

Q: What is it like to raise your kids on the farm when you don’t come from a farming background?
A: I didn’t grow up on a farm, but I did go to my grandparents’ farm on weekends. I was the city kid with the pet goat! Agriculture wasn’t something that was a part of my everyday life, but I couldn’t picture my life anywhere else now that I’m married to Travis. I consider raising our kids on the farm to be the biggest blessing and gift we can give them. They are well-rounded – they know to get things you have to work for them; they understand life, sickness and the processes of their food and meat. We teach them that God gave us these animals for a reason, and we’re to treat them well while we have them.

Q: How do you share your farming story with others?
A: I definitely think we have to be proactive. It’s easy for farmers to get weighed down with circumstances they can’t control and forget to show how happy they are to be farmers. You have to decide that’s your passion and it will come out in any conversation. Our daughter Charli is in a gifted program and on one of her field trips I shared with her teacher how our farm operation worked. She later sent me a note and asked if she could come out to the farm. People listen and want to hear that farmers care and that their food is being produced by somebody who has the same values as they do.

Q: The Tennessee Farm Bureau Young Farmers and Ranchers program has been a big part of your life. Is it important to have supportive organizations for young farmers like yourself?
A: Young farmers from Tennessee Young Farmers and Ranchers have been our closest friends. It’s helped me out tremendously by just listening to some of the issues that haven’t come up in mine and Travis’ conversations, as well as some things we haven’t had the opportunity to learn – it’s a good way for us to get our information. The support it provides is priceless and it feels good to know other people struggle with the same issues you do and hear what they’ve done to overcome them.

In my home landscape, you won’t find a dedicated vegetable garden, herb garden or cut flower garden. My entire landscape is a demonstration of interplanting different types of plants and the beauty and utility you can gain from such a gardening technique.

I have a blueberry bush planted next to an antique rose, which in the summer is also paired with fragrant basil surrounded by nonstop blooming low-growing petunias. This palette makes a colorful, showy statement in my garden, and I love picking the blueberries.

Where the street curb and my front yard intersect, I grow a selection of ornamental hot peppers that produces oodles of showy yellow, red and orange peppers all summer. They complement a nearby perennial clump of gold-flowering rudbeckia (also known as black-eyed susans), and together they make a striking contrast to the red tomato planted nearby. It’s not just aesthetics. Interplanting flowers, herbs, vegetables and fruits creates some benefits that enhance the overall success of my garden.

Attract Pollinators, Avoid Pests
Vegetables don’t always have the showiest flowers. To make sure the bees and butterflies find your veggies, interplant flowers with high nectar concentrations such as mint, sweet peas, cosmos, zinnias, larkspurs and marigolds. Flowers that are blue, yellow or white are the most attractive to pollinators.

Second, interplanting allows for fewer pest problems. A diverse garden creates a complex environment that helps attract beneficial insects and natural enemies to insect pests. Lady beetles are a fascinating example. They eat insect pests in both their immature and adult stages. Lesser known insects such as lacewings, syrphid flies and parasitic wasps eat other insects when they are immature, and then benefit the garden by acting as pollinators as adults. Parsley, dill, coriander (cilantro) and flowers from the aster family are especially good for attracting beneficial insects.

Be careful about planting vegetables that belong to the same family together, as they make for an easy target for plant-specific pests. For example, don’t pair up tomatoes, potatoes, peppers and eggplant. The Colorado potato beetle finds all of these delicious. Plant tomatoes and corn away from one another because the tomato fruitworm is also known as a corn earworm. And squash, cucumbers, pumpkins and melons share the same enemy: the pickleworm. Also, fewer diseases occur when the garden contains a mixture of plants.

The same goes for weeds, as mixed plantings capture a greater share of available resources than sole crops, leaving fewer resources for weeds. Interplanting typically provides greater soil coverage while shading and crowding out unwanted weeds.

Interplanting Saves Space
The method of companion gardening takes advantage of every inch of garden real estate. A handy method for anyone, interplanting is especially popular with those who have limited space.

Instead of planting in rows with wide open spaces, select plants that can grow in between and around each other without competing or crowding. Make sure the plants thrive in the same conditions with similar light, water and soil preferences.

Interplanted specimens should have different types of root systems, such as shallow rooted, medium rooted or deep rooted, so they won’t compete directly with each other. Corn, broccoli, spinach, cabbage, lettuce and the majority of flowering annuals are all shallow-rooted plants. Cucumbers, turnips, beans, summer squash, carrots, peas and a good portion of flowering perennials have medium-length roots, while tomatoes, asparagus, winter squash, pumpkin, and parsnips are deep rooted.

Balancing Act
Creating a balance between flowering plants and those valued for their foliage or fruits will add interest to your garden. No rule says all veggies or all herbs or all flowers need to be planted together. Monocultures dull the senses. I jazz things up by blending different plants. Watch for the opportunity to let color make a statement in your garden. I like to pair my flowering plants to complement my fruiting plants.

Interplanting a variety of plants is how the original cottage garden style evolved. Sectioning off gardens for specific types of plants was a luxury of the rich and leisured. You can apply the principles outlined here to container gardening as well. A patio tomato always looks better in combination with some flowers and herbs.

It started as a two-hour afternoon of banjo-pickin’ on the square. Today, you’ll still find musicians huddled under shade trees with their instruments and friends, but the annual Uncle Dave Macon Days festival in Murfreesboro has grown to a three-day event complete with music and dancing competitions.

This year marks the 35th anniversary of the music festival, which honors Uncle Dave Macon, a master banjo player, an early Grand Ole Opry superstar and member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. The celebration includes national championship competitions in old-time banjo playing, clogging and buck dancing. It also celebrates musicians and members of the community who strive to keep the music style alive and bring banjo playing to new audiences. (Related: Sutton Ole Time Music Hour)

In addition to the music, visitors can enjoy Rutherford County, Tennessee‘s historic Cannonsburgh Pioneer Village, arts and crafts, food vendors, film and photo displays of Uncle Dave Macon, and children’s activities. Saturday morning hosts the Motorless Parade, a tribute to Macon, who made his living as a freight caller and refused to learn to drive a motorized vehicle.

The festival, July 13-15, 2012, costs $5 for a one-day pass (Friday or Saturday) or $8 for a two-day pass. Admission is free on Sunday, when gospel music and shape note singing will take the main stage. For more information about the man and the 35th annual Uncle Dave Macon Days, visit www.uncledavemacondays.com.

I love the water. I love that it represents life, and that it so often provides relief and rejuvenation. I love that it manifests itself in diverse forms, but its powerful nature remains the same. I love that it takes me back to my childhood and now plays a recurring role on the summer stage for my own children.

Consider the ocean. The East Coast comes to my mind, as our family shares some of July with other beachcombers every year. As far back as I can remember, I’ve spent time at the beach during the summer months, and it always feels as if I’m visiting an old friend – one of those friends whom you leave feeling like a better person. The ocean seems to energize the spirit and recharge the heart. Jumping waves, swim racing to shore, hunting for sharks’ teeth, diving for conch shells – each salty activity cathartic in its own way.

Imagine a creek. I think of Big Hickory Creek, which runs along the property line behind the home of my in-laws. Many of our summer days have been spent skipping stones across that creek, wading into its chilly waters, collecting rocks along the bank or riding a tube over the small-scale rapids. It’s a happy place, and we always leave feeling refreshed. Someday we’ll borrow one of my nephews’ kayaks and go on a real adventure downstream.

Picture a sprinkler. We have the one with 20 holes along the top that send shots of water into the air while moving back and forth, creating waves of rain in our own backyard. Sometimes it’s dragged under the trampoline sending a spray of water up onto slippery jumpers or strategically placed near the slide on our swing set to create a water slide of sorts. Hours can be spent jumping in and out of that moving wall of water, which can be a waterfall, the secret entrance to another world or maybe just be a sprinkler. Whatever it is on any given day, it’s always a reprieve from the hot summer sun.

Whether it be the salty waves of the ocean, the rippling rapids of a creek, the rhythmic motion of a sprinkler, a favorite fishing hole, a metal washtub in the grass or any other means of getting wet, water is an endless source from which precious summer memories can flow.

About the Author
Freelance writer Lori Boyd also works part time as a registered nurse. She lives in Murfreesboro with her husband and their three children, who eagerly await the summer months and many opportunities for getting wet.

Other Posts by Lori
Without Change, There Would Be No Butterflies
A Steaming Mug of Winter Warmth

When severe weather strikes – be it flooding, tornadoes or even drought – the vast majority of Americans don’t have to worry that it will affect their jobs or cause them to take a pay cut. But for farmers, weather is critical in determining if a farm operation involving row crops has a successful year – or is a complete loss. (See also: Farmer Recounts Good Friday Tornado)

“A farmer can do all the customary practices such as utilizing fertilizers, planting the right variety at the right plant population per acre, controlling weeds and insects, and applying fungicides to control crop diseases, but most years the most limiting factor associated with a successful crop and good crop yields is water,” says Timothy Campbell, director of the University of Tennessee Extension for Dyer County. “From the time farmers place a seed in the ground, they rely on their faith that weather will provide adequate rainfall for producing a normal crop. If Mother Nature doesn’t cooperate, they can come up short for the year.”

Farmers also hope Mother Nature won’t be too generous with rainfall, which has been the case in recent years for West Tennessee producers.

“Flooding can affect their bottom line by delaying planting, which affects the overall yield potential of a crop,” Campbell says. “If they have already planted and it floods and they lose that crop, they have lost their investment in seed costs, fuel and time in preparation for and the actual planting of the crop. Generally farm profit margins are very low, and when you take into account the investments in equipment, buildings, houses, seed, chemicals and fertilizer, any devastating event such as flooding can have a tremendous impact on the revenue-generating potential of a farming operation.”

Jeremiah Hollingsworth of Dyer County knows all too well how weather can destroy hopes for a profitable year. On April 11, 2011, he and his wife Tevvy Hollingsworth returned home from Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital in Nashville with their recovering newborn daughter Scarlett, who had been born without a heartbeat after delivery complications. Days later, their 3,900-acre farm was hit by a 500-year flood.

“We deal with floodwaters on a yearly basis, but the magnitude of this one was far worse than we had ever seen,” says Hollingsworth, who raises corn, cotton and soybeans with his father Jerry, uncle George and cousin Luke. “When we found out the levee was not going to hold, we were under mandatory evacuation. We watched the river reports constantly, and they were right on the money.”

His family prepared as best they could by packing up their equipment and belongings from six houses and two sheds on the farm with the help of several volunteers.

“We are very grateful for our community,” Hollingsworth says. “We had 60 people helping us one day.”

Five days after the Hollingsworths evacuated, their entire farm was under water from the Mississippi River. The 15 miles of levee that normally protected their land had 24 breaks in it. Members of the Dyer County Levee and Drainage Board made the difficult decision to breach the levee, flooding farmland in an effort to save homes. Some of those making the decision did so knowing their own land would be under water as a result.

“If they hadn’t breached the levee, the whole thing probably would have been destroyed,” Campbell says.

Floodwaters remained up for six weeks, preventing farmers from planting, depositing sand in their fields and creating big holes in the soil.

“We’re still working on getting things back the way they were,” Hollingsworth says. “Nobody wants to lose a house to a flood, but in a farming community, it tends to be even worse. Our community and about 10 miles around us were inside that levee system, and around 20 houses were evacuated.”

Two of the Hollingsworths’ six houses were completely lost. Two houses have been repaired, and the family hasn’t decided what to do with the remaining two homes, both badly damaged. One of the houses they repaired belongs to Jeremiah’s grandmother, Marie Hollingsworth.

“We took all the sheetrock and flooring out and rewired her house,” Jeremiah says. “She didn’t have flood insurance because her house had been paid for for forever. She told us the only time she had ever been run out by floodwaters was back in 1937.”

The Corps of Engineers will bear some of the cost of repairing the levee, but slow-moving federal funding has prompted some farmers to repair parts of the levee at their own expense.
“These farmers are hoping to be reimbursed later, but they are trying to get ready for this year’s crop, so they can’t wait,” Campbell explains.

The May 2010 flood that damaged much of downtown Nashville and the Opryland area was hard on Dyer County as well, but not nearly as much as the one in April 2011.

“The Cumberland River winds all the way over to the Tennessee and Ohio rivers, and by the time it came down the Mississippi, we had time to get the water off us,” Hollingsworth says, adding that he’s very thankful the two floods didn’t happen in the same year.

It’s easy to see why farmers often have a love-hate relationship with rain.

“It is stressful because you want rainfall, but 99 percent of the time it’s not the perfect amount,” Hollingsworth says. “My dad says if it wasn’t a gamble, it wouldn’t be farming.”

As a backup for bad farming years, Hollingsworth sells crop insurance.

“It’s been a tough year. Some days I’m on the tractor and on the phone at the same time,” he says. “There are hardships all the time, but I love the freedom of farming. And I love getting my hands in the dirt.”

Fortunately, farmers tend to be an optimistic bunch. Hollingsworth’s daughter Scarlett celebrated her first birthday in March and is growing normally, learning to walk and “getting into everything.” Meanwhile, he’s hoping his 6-year-old son John will take up farming one day, following a longstanding family tradition.

“I think that’s every parent’s wish if they are involved in agriculture,” Hollingsworth says. “I’ve got him showing cattle already. I’m hoping farming keeps him occupied and out of trouble when he’s old enough to get into it. It sure did for me.”

Since the 1990s, we’ve seen our favorite celebrities wearing milk mustaches to promote the health benefits of milk. But June Dairy Month has been keeping the importance of dairy in the forefront of people’s minds for much longer, celebrating its 75th anniversary in 2012.

Started in 1937 as “National Milk Month” supported by the National Dairy Council and dubbed “June Dairy Month” in 1939, the promotion was originally designed to increase dairy demand during the summer months of peak production. It transformed into promoting the overall use of dairy foods in the mid-1950s.

In Tennessee, communities celebrate with parades and festivals, such as Greene County Partnership’s June Dairy Days Celebration and Athens’ National MooFest Dairy Festival (see more on page X). The Tennessee 4-H Club sponsors a poster contest for members and honors the winners at a luncheon in Nashville.

How do you plan to honor June Dairy Month?

There’s a buzz in the air among Jackson gardeners, and it tends to surround the annual University of Tennessee Summer Celebration Lawn and Garden Show and one big question: What will the theme be this year?

That’s because organizers Jason Reeves and Carol Reese don’t host an average gardening festival with seminars on typical topics. They like to spice things up a bit.

“We do crazy things to get people’s attention,” says Reeves, horticulturalist and research associate at the University of Tennessee’s West Tennessee Research and Education Center, where the Summer Celebration takes place each July. “It also gets the media’s attention, which turns into free advertising. I’m fortunate to have a great boss who lets us get very creative. Basically, we can do anything we want as long as it doesn’t cost money.”

In 2007, for example, celebration organizers collected nearly 300 thrown-away bicycles from local garbage dumps and hung them on cables above garden beds, creating the illusion of bicycles flying through the air. That year was the 100th anniversary of the West Tennessee Research and Education Center, and the theme was “Annual Vines Climbing to New Heights.”

“The locals are always curious about what the theme will be, but we keep it a bit of a secret each year,” says Reese, a UT extension horticulture specialist who leads a popular UT Gardens tour at the event and writes a weekly gardening column for the Jackson Sun.

Another year, organizers collected more than 850 men’s neckties and hung them from bamboo structures at the Summer Celebration, with employees at the event wearing loose neckties. The theme that year was “All Tied Up in Gardening.”

In 2011, the celebration focused on all the possibilities for creating a garden around your mailbox, and the theme was “Come Check the Mail.”

“We created dozens of mailbox gardens with different plantings, and you could reach inside each mailbox and get a brochure about the plants used in that planting,” Reese says.
The mailbox gardens covered a wide range of tastes, “from the elegant to the redneck.”
“There were rural themes, whimsical gardens and even some mailboxes that were shot up,” Reese says with a laugh.

“We had an uptown section, a trailer park section, a redneck section and even a no-maintenance section with silk flowers that had funny names, like Dollar Store Dilly and Wally World Wonder,” Reeves adds.

The Summer Celebration Lawn and Garden Show is now in its 23rd year and attracts between 2,000 and 3,000 spectators each year.

“Our visitors have a wide range of skill sets, from the novice gardener to the seasoned expert, but they all have one thing in common – a desire to make their own lawn and landscape beautiful,” says Ginger Trice Rowsey, information specialist for the UT Institute of Agriculture. “And with so many wonderful garden displays, plants for sale and knowledgeable plant people on hand, everyone walks away with fresh ideas for their own garden.”

The Summer Celebration draws visitors from Nashville, Memphis, Mississippi and Arkansas. There are indoor and outdoor tours on the 600-acre property, some of which give participants the opportunity to ride on a wagon through fields of golden sunflowers. Attendees can also sit in on workshops presented by UT experts.

“The grounds are beautiful – there is so much color,” Reese says. “The purpose of the day is to show people how many great plants do well in our climate. People tend to do the same old boring things, but we show them how to express themselves creatively in the garden.”

The 2012 Summer Celebration happens Thursday, July 12 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Food vendors will be onsite, including lunch prepared by local 4-H members.

“It always feels like a real celebration,” Reese says. “Gardeners are a special bunch – very optimistic and nurturing. The Summer Celebration is a meeting of the minds that creates lots of excitement. At the end of the day, we’re all smiles.”

By the way, if you are wondering what this year’s theme will be, the organizers have revealed that it’s “Hydrangeas for Southern Gardens,” but their lips are sealed on the details. You’ll just have to attend the event to see what they have in store.

If You Go …
The 2012 Summer Celebration Lawn and Garden Show takes place Thursday, July 12 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the West Tennessee Research and Education Center. It is located at 605 Airways Blvd. in Jackson, TN. Admission is $5 for adults. Children 17 and under are free. For more information, call (731) 424-1643.

“So I just step off the edge?”

“Yep.”

“You’re sure?”

My ziplining guide, Michael Peterson, grabs the strap hanging from my helmet and pulls it tight – for the third time in the last 10 minutes he’s spent calming my nerves – before clipping the pulley attached to my harness to the steel cable and running it back and forth a few passes to make sure it is secure. He smiles down at me. “You’re ready to fly.”

Standing at the edge of a wooden platform built about seven feet off the ground on the edge of a ravine, my eyes follow the steel cable secured to the tree behind me until it disappears into the old growth forest. I can’t see the end, but I can see the ground – many, many feet below me.

“Here goes nothing.” I clutch the rope connecting my harness to the zipline and take a step.

And I’m flying.

The trees are a blur as I pass them, my legs kicking, my arms stretched out in either direction. I can hear Peterson cheering me on, but his voice is lost behind me as I zip across the 100-yard cable. Soon I only hear my voice, squealing and laughing as I zoom down the zipline. (Related: See the writer’s ziplining video.)

The end is approaching so I prepare for my landing. The ziplines at Adventureworks in Kingston Springs don’t use hand brakes on the cables. Instead, the lines are designed to slant higher toward their end, and I have to stop myself by putting my feet down and slowing my momentum.

“Imagine you’re landing on a moving treadmill,” the guide’s words from earlier echo in my mind in the five seconds I have to prepare myself for this landing.

The ground approaches, and I find myself sprawled on my back on the forest floor, my torso still attached to the zipline by my harness. It was less than graceful, but I’m too exhilarated to care.

“I told you that you’d love it!” Peterson announces as he lands on both feet and unhooks his harness in one fluid motion. Show off.

But he’s right, I did love it – even the sloppy landing. I’m not sure why I doubted him. Peterson has 23 years of experiences as a ziplining guide, and he’s been at Adventureworks in Kingston Springs, just 30 minutes west of Nashville, since the park first installed ziplines in 2008. (Related: Ziplining Sites in Tennessee)

Peterson swears there are no special skills required with the landing, and that “it will get easier with more practice, I promise.” (I, in fact, prove this theory wrong. I get continuously worse at the landing part as we make our way through the park’s nine ziplines. But in my defense, by the time we’ve approached the longest zipline of the day – a whopping two football fields long – I’m having so much fun that I find myself swinging my legs around and laying back in my harness. So the landings sneak up on me.)

Adventureworks first opened as a team-building activity center in 1987. Jennifer Halverson and Brian Davis now own the park, which still offers teamwork programs but also caters to providing fun adventures for families and other groups.

The land around the park naturally lent itself to ziplining, Davis says. “The topography in this area is ideal,” he notes. “The bend of the Harpeth River cuts through these hills and creates these incredible ravines. If you tried to walk it, you’d have to hike down to these very low spots – our highest zip is 84 feet off the ground – and then you’d have to hike back up.”

But you don’t have to have a large forest of 80-foot ravines to set up a zipline. In fact, many farms across the state are adding ziplines to their agritourism attractions.

RiverView Mounds Century Farm in Clarksville has two ziplines – one 600 feet long and the other about 400 – which range between 15 and 30 feet off the ground. They offer ziplining to families who visit during the farm’s spring and fall festivals.

Brothers Chris and Steve Rinehart and Chris’ wife, Scarlett Mulligan-Rinehart, have been running RiverView Mounds since the brothers inherited the farm in 2006. It was on a kindergarten field trip with their son to a pumpkin farm in Portland that Chris Rinehart and his wife realized what they wanted to do with RiverView Mounds’ 400 acres.

“We’d never even considered agritourism, even though it makes so much sense to us now,” Mulligan-Rinehart says. “I just remember sitting on that Portland farm and my husband and I looking at each other and both saying, ‘We have to do this.’ ”

A few years later, the husband and wife had the same experience while standing on the platform getting ready to take off down a zipline in Mammoth Cave, Ky.

“We’re standing there, all harnessed in and getting ready to zip, and I turned and looked at Chris and just like that time on our son’s field trip, we both just instantly knew this was it,” Mulligan-Rinehart recalls. “This is what we needed on the farm.”

Mulligan-Rinehart, who is also the president of Tennessee’s Agritourism Association, had been looking for a way to entertain the teens who visit RiverView Mounds with their families.

“I’d watched so many teenagers come to our farm with their families” she says. “And they were texting or sulking, their lips curled up, just determined not to have a good time. I wanted a way to engage that group.”

They didn’t waste any time. On the car ride back to Tennessee from their ziplining trip, Mulligan-Rinehart was on her smartphone researching professionals in the Clarksville area who could set up safe ziplines. By fall 2011, RiverView Mounds had their zips.

“It’s becoming so popular,” she says. “Every farm is going to be putting these in soon.”

Ziplining is a great attraction for any farm or community because pretty much anyone can do it.

“I always joke that ‘If you can put on a pair of pants, you can zipline,’ because putting on the harness is the hardest part,” Peterson says back at Adventureworks. “It really is something anyone can enjoy. The oldest person I’ve had on a tour was 96. She wanted to cross it off her bucket list.”

“It doesn’t matter your age or who you are, you’re going to enjoy this,” he adds. “It’s such a unique experience, you just clip on and let go. You can’t help but enjoy yourself. After you leave, it’s still running through your mind, even the next day. That sense of youthfulness stays with you.”

I’m begging him to run through the course just one more time before we call it a day.

“What happened to the girl who was afraid to walk off the ledge?” he asks as he clips me to the cable and tests that it is secure.

I just shrug and leap off the platform. And I’m flying.