The Duchess of Cambridge, 35, wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty as she visited Farms for City Children in Gloucestershire, England on Wednesday.
The mother-of-two, who opted for a dressed-down ensemble of skinny jeans, a khaki coat and knee-high boots, met with children’s author Michael Morpurgo and his wife Clare, who founded the organisation in 1976.
Farms for City Children offers city kids from all over the U.K. the chance to live and work together for a week at a time on a real farm in the heart of the countryside.
First on the royal’s agenda was a meeting with the organisations founders.
There’s no doubt about it… Kate knows a thing or two about farmer-chic!
After a storytelling session led by Mr Morpurgo, the down-to-earth royal joined schoolchildren and teachers as they completed a variety of tasks around the farm, including tending to pigs, sheep and chickens.
Kate was pictured bottle-feeding a six-week-old lamb named Stinky, a Lleyn breed of sheep who was born on the farm.
Farm manager John Goodman explained that the darling lamb earned his rather unfortunate name after an even more unfortunate experience.
“He got a bit of a stomach infection and he had diarrhoea and he was a bit smelly. The children said he was stinky and the name stuck,” he said.
Mr Goodman added: “He’s destined to be eaten – the kids will be horrified.”
The Duchess took a real shining to little Stinky.
She’s a natural!
The royal blended in seamlessly with the day’s activities.
The Duchess also tried her hand at ‘pig weighing,’ which involves corralling a pig into a pen to be weighed.
“We use pig boards to coral or drive the pigs into the crate to weigh them,” Mr Goodman said.
“The Duchess had a pig board and was brilliant with it. She said she had never done pig weighing before.”
No surprise there!
The Duchess’s hands-on engagement was rounded off with a short tea party and a meeting with some of the charity’s volunteers, trustees and staff.
Kate is said to have handled the tricky task with ease.
While planting onions, Kate asked the children if they had ever held a worm.
Kate certainly is a woman of many talents, among them photography!
In celebration of her daughter’s second birthday, the amateur photographer captured a stunning portrait of her chubby-cheeked princess.
The darling portrait shows Princess Charlotte in a yellow cardigan among bales of hay at their Anmer Hall estate. Her shiny chestnut locks are coiffed to the side with a navy blue bow as she plays with a toy in her hands.
Kensington Palace shared the heart-melting new photo on the eve of her birthday.
What a darling portrait!
Taking the opportunity to thank well-wishers, the birthday portrait was accompanied with a message from the Cambridges.
“The Duke and Duchess are very pleased to share this photograph as they celebrate Princess Charlotte’s second birthday. Their Royal Highnesses would like to thank everyone for all of the lovely messages they have received, and hope that everyone enjoys this photograph of Princess Charlotte as much as they do,” the statement read.
According to her proud parents, their “extremely chatty” daughter certainly keeps them on their toes.
“She is very cute but has quite a feisty side. George has turned out to be a lovely little boy. I hope he will keep Charlotte in order,” Duchess Catherine recently revealed.
While we haven’t seen the fourth-in-line to the throne since December, this year is set to be huge for Charlotte as she will play a starring role in aunt Pippa’s wedding next month and move from Anmer Hall in Norfolk back to Kensington Palace in London, before starting nursery school in the not too distant future.
