Six Arrows Farm Update

It begins to be pleasant to be indoors now because of the deepening chill...but it is still even more pleasant to be out of doors because of the bracing air.  Everything alive is going to sleep, but the sun of a hundred summer days is being coaxed out of the earth by stretching frosty nights until, even on a cloudy day, the wind smells exotic and rich like a breath out of the orient.

The dark arms of the trees strike out against shades of azure so arrestingly beautiful they take my breath away. 

A growing crowd of winter wraps are hugging the hooks by the front door...masses of heavy coats capped by the light jackets and swathed in trailing scarves.  Minnesotans have a distinctive penchant for winter fashion and, small wonder, we especially love our coats.  The polar fleece vest and the heavy down snow coat, the formal trench coat and the light jacket all hold their own indispensable place.

In our house at least, winter garments far outnumber summer garments...and astronomically outweigh them.  All my favorite clothes belong in this category.  I love bundling up in them.  Scarves to settle my chin into, layers to wrap around my shoulders, socks to cozy my toes.  There is comfort and security and rest wrapped up in the look and feel and smell of winter clothes.  Yes the smell...they spend hours imbibing the scents of countless fires, settling onto the creaky family room couch with hundreds of comfortable guests in the light of aforementioned fires and saturating the rich aromas of a thousand piping winter dinners.  A thick wool sweater evokes images of some of our favorite things on the farm...steaming cups of coffee and tea, snow, early mornings, long days cutting wood, good books.

Something about all the tucking away and storing up inspires its own kind of anticipation...similar to the keen thrilling craving that comes in spring for plowing and sowing.  I find myself nearly ready to open a seed catalogue again with relish...but not until we have completely buried ourselves in the hot, spicy, steamy, gregarious, bursting-at-the-seams Thanksgiving kitchen.

Better even than eating good food is planning it...conjuring up images of everything that brings comfort to the palate and hence enthusiasm and contentment to the conversation.  Right about now I am dangerous on a shopping trip.  My eyes are bigger than our refrigerator and cupboards combined.  Mama and I couldn’t resist the dates on our grocery trip today...she said “dates in your oatmeal” and I grabbed extra boxes.  Every kind of food sounds appealing...to make.  And I’m not even dreaming about eating anything yet!  This is the special privilege of the cook...a double measure of anticipation.  Our fresh diet is still supplied almost exclusively from the farm...loads of steamy squash, smooth buttery potatoes, strong sweet onions.  Throw in a favorite herb and some frozen beans, pull a savory so-tender-it-falls-apart-in-your-hands chicken out of the crock-pot, drench the potatoes with gravy from the drippings and eat like a king.  I am beginning to plan for bacon and eggs or ham and cloves and the pigs are nearly ready for market. 

The last market just rolled into the gathered endeavors of the year.  The remaining bounty is for us to enjoy.  When we are powerless to bring food for ourselves from the ground, we are made glaringly aware of our absolute reliance on our Maker.  The time will come to break out the first jar of tomatoes, the first bag of beans...when we will be compelled day by day to give thanks.

God thunders wondrously with his voice;
he does great things that we cannot comprehend.
For to the snow he says, 
‘Fall on the earth,’
likewise to the downpour, his mighty downpour.
He seals up the hand of every man,
that all men whom he made may know it.
Then the beasts go into their lairs,
and remain in their dens.
From its chamber comes the whirlwind,
and cold from the scattering winds.
By the breath of God ice is given,
and the broad waters are frozen fast.

~Job 37:5-10

Listen to the farewell songs of the birds that fly away south, telling their tales of foreign climes and balmy glades; then pull your hat down over your ears, drag your socks up past your boot tops and whistle the merry brittle tunes of winter down their soaring wake to speed them away from the frigid blast.  They’ll not come home till the new season wends round at the appointed time; and here we’ll bide awhile without them in good cheer, with faith in our Father to bring the year round.

Craig, Karen and The Six Arrows

Six Arrows Farm Update

The dog days of summer...the powder of the road on my windshield like flour on a kneading board; glittering dewy mornings that give way to glaring sultry high noon’s that languish into indolent shimmering afternoons that fade into deep purpled evenings; thirsty baking earth and warm rain falling in tempestuous summer cataracts; raspberries hanging like black jewels in the cloisters of their drooping vines; patches of vibrant lilac thistle blooms humming and swaying to the songs of a hundred bees; gradient tan lines creeping up our arms, sun-highlights in our hair; brown noses and freckles.

I have found the secret to enjoying work on these days is to move slowly...with the languid sway of the corn leaves and the heavy drooping of the tree limbs.  Stand in a little dell of the forest and you can hear a zephyr whispering through the boughs as the shade cools it until it reaches you like a fresh draft that has crept through the chinks of heat. Sleepy are the livid greens in the woods and sleepy are the shimmering waves of heat hovering over the dusty road.  Lilting are the bird's songs, more brilliant than the greatest diva’s aria, trilling and swaying with lowering branch, whistling high enough to wake anything but a recumbent summer day.  Wonder of wonders that this drowsy world should yield such abundance of life as we reap from its folds.  Midsummer, casting forth the splendor of first fruits, is a queen at her coronation.  A little over a week ago, the crops were ravaged in a storm full of hail and yet they flourish and blossom voraciously in answer to sun and rain.

It took a while, but we finally cleaned and aired all the clothing and bedding from the last reenactment.  Things come in smelling fresh and sunny and dewy when they hang in the open air...nothing like the sterilized tang of detergent and drier sheets.  Some raspberries became concentrated “gem-juice” in the form of jam under Aubrey’s skilled hands last week.  Our quota of bread for market has reached its summer apex of over a hundred loaves and graces the market stand in plentiful heaps of savory and sweet.  The pigs delve away into nooks and crannies in the sheltering caves of the woods and make the echoes ring with grunts of satisfaction and squeals of rivalry.   Cabbages bulge from their frosty green cradles while we make plans for coleslaw and cabbage soup and sour kraut.

Last night we were sauntering at an easy mid-summer pace up the evening road that glows in waning golden light when Daddy called a halt and told us to listen...and smell.  The wind tasted of that ripe sweetness that thrills the heart of a farmer with satisfaction and exaltation...and our ears caught the grumble of a tractor navigating those billows of loam on the other side of our valley..."Someone is cutting hay," ...his knowing smile echoed on our own faces.

“Some neighboring farmer, compliant with ageless necessity, cut off his rich emerald crop and laid it in windrows on the shorn earth for the sun to turn to gold.  Wherever I am when I taste that ripe sweetness of mown alfalfa in the wind, I come home in my heart. Here to the daily sameness and constant change, the relentless energy, the lasting rest, the old familiar and new every sunrise little taste of heaven.” 

I wrote that last year during the last hay-cutting of summer.  This cutting is one of the first.  I knew and loved the thought and aroma of hay cutting then just as I do now...and yet not quite.  The shifting of time pours familiarity and longing into all loves that are at once ever-fresh and ever-ripening.   So has our heavenly Father ordained the ebbing and flowing tide of His creation.

It was one of those warm ripe days, the kind where the heat of the sun soaks into the very marrow of you and makes you want to jump up and run for miles and be very still all at the same time.  Breathing the air was like drinking strong wine, so laden was it with the flavors of harvest.  Dappled light was dancing to the music of the lively trees.  Old patriarchs of the woods tossed their lofty arms in a cheery gale, casting leaves merrily into the breeze like clouds of confetti at a celebration.  A broad span of corn field mesmerized my eyes with the shimmering role and dip of the sea turned to gold and heralded the onslaught of the wind with voice of thundering waves. The whole world swayed and whispered with the roar of one mighty crowd in the midst of an overture, peering over the vast edge of a moment of expectation towards an indiscernible culmination.

I was driving home…yes plain-old-ordinary driving home…with these thoughts simmering in my mind.  I thought of what a nice beginning that would be for a really good sit-by-the-fire story; and then remembered how much easier it is to begin a tale than end it, even as “The end of a thing is better than its beginning.” (Ecclesiastes 7:8)  For all the books ever written, there must be a thousand that languish in closets in a perpetual state of infancy. 

Between the covers of a story, that stand out in ripples of poetry, lie the facts in lines of prose.  Here, while the colors of autumn flame and fade, the wood must be chopped and stacked, the last chickens processed, the last grass clinging to living green must be cut, the last fruit gathered.

Already the last of the apples, excluded from regimental rows of cans stored away, are just beginning to wrinkle with age in bushel baskets.  Our pumpkins sport wooden stems cured from once-juicy slips of vine.  The tomato plants are officially spent; resulting in a blending of emotions for those of us who reveled in the treat of fresh tomatoes all summer and survived the late nights and soggy hands of the sixty-quart canning season. The diminishing “side-table” in our family room is reestablished to its former height with new bags of wheat.  It probably comes as no surprise that we decorate with our bulk food-supplies.  In any case, once the stack is leveled with a board and draped with tanned deer-hides, it truly makes a lovely buffet...really.  The only drawback I can discover to edible furnishings is the perpetual fluctuation in size.

Our table groans under bounty of a different kind than heretofore.  Mountains of potato salads and fresh salsas, and heaping bowls of cherry tomatoes give place to pots of hearty chili and savory soup and steaming stacks of cornbread with vegetables from the frozen regions of the freezer.

Autumn is in the lane that leads home now. The bird-songs will trill on a chilled and shortened tune when the wind blows with ice on his breath. The door to the old year is just around the corner.  Very soon it will close, but the wonder of living is the privilege of leaving the old behind and walking on into the time on the other side of the door.

In this sense, a tale never really ends.  I am beginning to think the best “end” to a story must be a closed door, with mystery and promise of the nameless future behind it, since it tacitly forbids the mortal reader to look past the threshold of time into the awesome knowledge of eternity; a thing which none of us can really do…yet. 

A Six Arrows Farm Update

The Lenz family never stays in one mode of action long enough to be stuffed into any kind of box of modern identification.  Just when you have us comfortably settled into the musical family mold, we pop out with a day of chicken processing on the front drive.  As soon as you are sure we can’t be anything but farmers, the tendency to dress up and play at history pokes suspiciously through a cranny. It happens accidentally on purpose.  We can’t be satisfied with the hum-drum of a singular occupation when our sheer numbers alone, not to mention the varied gifts and united purpose of the household, enable the most lively kind of economical enterprise and social development.  The danger is not doing too little, but trying to do too much.

Just as we transition a hundred times a week into entirely different kinds of work, our house morphs nearly as often into drastically varied forms of function.  Today it is a bakery, root-cellar, and sorting/packaging facility.  Tomorrow it will be a rehearsing venue for the Lenz quartet.  Sunday it may throw wide its doors for hospitality and Monday it will turn into a canning facility.

True to custom, the last of the tomatoes are gathered into the house in miscellaneous mounds.  From the first vine-ripened fruit to the last half-green straggler time leaps in a few short weeks.  The transient type of glory stored up in the brilliance of the dazzling red tomato is akin to its season.  Just as the abundant snow of winter melts away as if it had never been, so the fruit of the vine grows, ripens and vanishes again.  Seasons are like that.  They are enduring only because they are always sure to come back, for as long as they are ordained to, with a kind of persistence that savors of the changelessness of their Designer.  Since there are no officially designated tomato storage and sorting rooms in evidence on the farm, we establish the cheeky invaders on the floors of our basement and entry-way, honoring the future situation of a guest’s chair with the present habitation of a profuse harvest.

I can admit freely that picking your way from the front door to the stairs over boxes and buckets of tomatoes in various stages of ripening and decay is less than convenient.  And to be quite frank, stumbling blindly over them in the dark of night on the way to the kitchen for a drink is positively dangerous, especially to the toes.  In consequence, Ben, with substantial assistance from his brothers, is digging a 10x12 root cellar into one of our hillsides.  It is our sincere desire to avoid stubbed toes and mad rushes to clear the mountains of produce for visitors in future.  How successful the attempt will be remains to be seen.  We tend to be creatures of habit and, regrettably, often fly in the face of expedience with the traditional modus operandi when it comes to gardening.

The chill air is laden with one of my favorite scents today: fresh-cut hay.  Some neighboring farmer, compliant with ageless necessity, cut off his rich emerald crop and laid it in windrows on the shorn earth for the sun to turn to gold.  Wherever I am when I taste that ripe sweetness of mown alfalfa in the wind, I come home in my heart.  Here to the daily sameness and constant change, the relentless energy, the lasting rest, the old familiar and new every sunrise little taste of heaven.

Tomato, Tomahto

The bounty of our tomato plants yielded over 50 quarts of stewed tomatoes this year!...

This flatbed-full represents only a fraction of the harvest.

We make everything from fresh Salsa to V8, Taco Salad to Tomato Soup.

It means chili, lasagna, spaghetti, soup and canned salsa all winter long!

Ballooning Big Beefs, Rosy Cherry Juliets, Smooth Romas, Delectable Brandywine Heirlooms, Pearly Pink Beautys, Purpley Cherry Sugar Annes, Bright and Round Wisconson 55's...a tomato for every purpose.

Sweet Stuff!

Any guesses as to what these jars contain?