Six Arrows Farm Update

Our meals for the past week were composed primarily of leftovers from the bounty table.  Thanksgiving with all its fullness of bread and overflowing of joy has come (in a flurry of preparation and gathering) and gone (to the last crumb of roll, drop of gravy and sliver of pie).  With the customs of generations we mixed the freshness of new traditions, like peanut soup, and took our dose of merrymaking and feasting with relish.

While Thanksgiving rounded the bend, so did the last of fall.  Even we Minnesotans were surprised at the suddenness of the weather shift.  Thursday morning the sun rose and warmed the air to a balmy 60° that spent the rest of the day plummeting to a chilly 31°!  The year wasted no time going to his bed.  Like a child wearied from a long day of play, he tumbled in and pulled the counterpane up to his ears without bothering to roll over.

Later than usual this year, the pigs are nevertheless off to Odenthal Meats.  Some of you may recall that loading the pigs to take them to the butcher has come to be an annual comedic adventure.  The occasion has allowed some among us to lay claim to the feat of pig-riding.  All of us have a healthy respect for three-hundred pound animals with a center of gravity somewhere around your knees and a perverse inclination to run in the direction which is least desirable to we would-be herders.  Pig-herding yarns are legendary among farmers because of the porcine propensity to bust the herd and scatter with high-pitched squeals of protest.

Since our pigs spend their lives in the lap of luxury and get the run of large paddocks all summer, they are generally more frisky and spirited than most hogs.  The short drive to the trailer every fall has become a sort of trial and frolic all at the same time.  A trial because it takes a great deal of time and effort and sweat to move animals that are determined not to move; and a frolic because they never fail to provide at least a few good laughs with their maniacal antics and escape tactics.

The reader will consequently understand the mixture of relief and disappointment that we experienced when this year's pigs gave very little trouble.  The secret, we discovered, was the nearly daily habit we had the last few months of bringing them a small "treat"...a bucket of leftover tomatoes, a bowl of lettuce leavings,  a pile of pigweed.  They came to expect a daily offering and the last month or so, you couldn't walk by their fence without the whole passel of them galloping over with a chorus of insistent snorts and barks looking for something to nibble.  Mr. Berg’s dried corn was the winning “carrot” to the successful roundup.

With the last of the summer stock gone, the only animals remaining on the farm are the dogs (Cappy, Eddy and Pete), the cats (Dip and Chip) and the laying hens.  Sorties into the cold to replenish their comforts and food are followed by long hours before the fire or around the table.  Here we learn to treasure the hours together with beautiful music, the blessed scent of balsam fir from our Christmas tree, bright conversation, delicious food and good books.  The books...ah yes.  Their smells, the a foretelling of a wealth between the pages, rich and ripe, smooth and tangy, spicy and sweet, dark and musky.

Scents are remarkably powerful, I believe, because they are invisible associations with the familiar; attaching themselves like identification tags to the aesthetic forms and even thoughts of our lives so often we usually forget to note them.  The elements of a moment, the facial expressions, the light, the textures, the sounds, the emotions, can all be bound to the imagination with a single aroma.  In that sense, every scent is a small evocative grace granted by God to remind and store up new memories, mostly unconscious, and yet irresistibly cogent.  This time of year the smells are especially compelling. Perhaps because they are older than my earliest recollections, shadows of things I can't remember.  In any case, they are continually thrusting me over the cliff of nostalgia.  I know that sounds violent, but how else can you describe the instant tumble into memory that a fragrance like fresh pine can invoke? 

What musings do your senses call upon right now? 

Six Arrows Farm Update

The subdued hills and woods and fields are waiting with bated breath to be washed and clothed in snow-light like a bride.  When the last saturated splash of living color fades, I long for that flood of dazzling frosty flashing white.  There was a hint of it this morning before the sun kissed the grass...every blade and twig was encrusted with a thousand diamonds.  The annual foraging for a harvest of venison begins tomorrow.  At least three Lenz men will rise in the wee hours and seek out their quarry from the plentiful summer-fattened herd.

I stoked the fire before tumbling into bed last night.  A blessed old habit born again after months of cold hearth and empty wood box.  Broad smooth tiles before the sooty black stove that cooled my dusty summer feet glowed in the dim light and dancing heat...a silent invitation to bask.  Stepping into the house to be greeted by these permeating mingled scents of life and ashes is a continual joy now.  Back it comes to paint its familiar ever-changing scenery on the family room wall, throwing fantastical shadows and lights over familiar framed faces and new colors on beloved old bindings marching rank and file along the shelves.  Even as the death of the outer world sweeps away every vestige of color and life, firelight inside echoes autumn's song and carries a flashing refrain into the depths of sleeping winter.  

Here in our home a new kind of summer grows strong, careless alike of numbing cold and rushing blast.  This refuge where God grants to us quiet and rest is of all places in the world most sacred and cherished.  Anyone who knows us will believe me when I say that this quiet and rest in our house has almost nothing to do with dullness or inactivity.  A subversive kind of energy radiates from the house in every kind of enterprise...and by mid-afternoon, begins to culminate in the kitchen.  If your day of work leaves you exhausted,  all you have 

to do is follow your nose.  Imagine pumpkin and squash baking slowly until the juices caramelize on the pan, followed by pumpkin seeds roasted crackling and snapping until they blush golden.  Potatoes and onions and venison all simmering in a pot all day until the meat lends its full flavor to the potatoes and soaks in the savory zest of the onions casts up the most delicious and tantalizing aroma.  

Then around the dinner table, a reviving aroma of another kind rises, regardless of seasonal swelter or chill.  Here the throne of family holds sway and teaches us time and again through sundry simplicity and familiarity how trivial the many aggrandized issues of men really are.  
So says the Maker of hearth and home:

"Thus says the Lord

'Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, let not the mighty man glory n his might, nor let the rich man glory in his riches;  But let him who glories glory in this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord, exercising lovingkindness, judgment and righteousness in the earth.  For in these I delight,'

says the Lord."
Jeremiah 9:23-24

Here is a greatness in the beaming glow emanating from every face that puts the pomp and swagger of potentates to shame...a sovereignty of a different kind than that granted rulers and powers of the earth.  Here we learn that in all things, the small as well as the mighty, God will have dominion over men and in this we take comfort, since no device of men can bring of such servitude and mutual dependence more joy and contentment, nor lift the sons and daughters of mankind to more pure and lasting freedom.

“Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him.  For He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast.  The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; He makes the plans of the peoples of no effect.  The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of His heart to all generations.

Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people He has chosen as His own inheritance.  The Lord looks from heaven; He sees all the sons of men.  From the place of His dwelling He looks on all the inhabitants of the earth; He fashions their hearts individually; He considers all their works.  No kin is saved by the multitude of an army; a mighty man is not delivered by great strength.  A horse is a vain hope for safety; neither shall it deliver any by its strength.

Behold they eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him, on those who hope in His mercy, to deliver their soul from death, and to keep them alive in famine.  Our soul waits for the Lord; He is our help and our shield.  For our heart shall rejoice in Him, because we have trusted in His holy name.  Let Your mercy, O Lord, be upon us, just as we hope in You.
Psalm 33:8-22

The affairs of the world are in turmoil and set before us a constant battle to be fought. The imaginations of men grow dark, but around the family table, before the family hearth, we are reminded of this:

All the ends of the world shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before You.  For the kingdom is the Lord's, and He rules over the nations."
Psalm 22:27-28

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

Are you hungry?  How many times a day does your body "ask" for nourishment?  Upon whom do you depend for food?

Life on a farm brings us about as close as we can get to the root of physical provision.  When your hands make room in the dirt for a seed that grows and clears weeds from the ground around a blossoming plant and severs the ripe fruit from the stem, you can't miss the wonder of "our daily bread."  On the farm, we learn that food is not something that will perpetually line the grocery store shelves.  It is a precious gift from the Creator to His creation.  A timely, daily, miraculously enduring reminder of our dependence on what we cannot truly guarantee for ourselves.

In a small way, the power of provision comes home when we feed our animals every morning.  Here the hogs come running to greet us, barking ecstatically, tearing up the deep rich soil of the forest floor in their mad haste like a crowd of play-weary children to the abundant table...because they know we bring dinner.  A mass of pig weed from the broccoli patch or the leavings of fresh veggies from our own meal sends their whimsical little tails wagging.  Yes...pigs wag their tails in joy.  They keep time with the curly little appendages while they plow trenches through dirt with their shoveling noses or strip leaves from the stems of vegetation with their pearly teeth.

There are the chicks, still mildly adorable in their half-fluff, half-feathered state, half submerged in the verdant sea of emerald pasture, stretching tiny stout legs with a lazy "cheep" and a hazy blink of the eye in the morning light before they waddle a foot for a tasty morsel of clover.  Even after the last vestige of cute "chick-ness" has melted away into the clumsy fatness of "chicken-hood," there will be a smile of satisfaction on my face every time I see their enthusiasm for fresh grass. 

The infinite satisfaction that accompanies the sight of contentment in a living creature should not surprise us.  Food, when abundant, can become the most vapid and commonplace element in a day, but the lack of it for any amount of time is disconcerting and detrimental, while great depravation can become a source of panic and even insanity.  As surely as you will become full after eating dinner tonight, so surely will your belly beg for more tomorrow morning.  In this way we are never permitted to forget our indebtedness, in recognition of which fact generations have preserved a tradition of thanksgiving prayers before every meal.  A farmer is in some ways like a father to his beast, and how imperfectly yet lucidly does this reflect the granting of life we have from our Father.

 

I think of this often.  Does the fruitfulness of a vine ever overwhelm you?  Do the life-giving veins of a leaf beat a stained glass window hollow for you?  Can the tenacity and forgiveness of herbage to freshen in rain after drought enthrall you?  Will wind rushing down the breath of a storm to cool the day make you want to run with it to the end of the earth?  Does the hap-hazard rocking-horse-plunging of a pig in sheer jollity make your laughter overflow?

In time long past, God asked Job this question:

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?

Tell me, if you have understanding.

Who determined its measurements—surely you know!

Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone,

when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

“Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb,

when I made clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band,

and prescribed limits for it and set bars and doors, and said,

‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed’?

Have you commanded the morning since your days began,

and caused the dawn to know its place...?”

from Job 38

How much of this can you or I bring about, or preserve until tomorrow?  The question knows its own answer, as we should.  We could ask in return:

“O Lord...what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” from Psalm 8

The wonder is not that there is hunger and even dire want in the world, but that there should be a yield to our need at all.  I will venture to repeat the words of my forbears in this.  There is nothing you or I can do to deserve our daily bread more than another, so be like the chick who waits with certainty on us for his food and the pig who rejoices unstintingly at the coming of dinner.

Eat with thankfulness on your lips today, for no man can truly know where his next meal is coming from apart from the bountiful provision of our heavenly Father.

“Oh, taste and see that the LORD is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!”

Psalm 34:8

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.

Six Arrows Farm Update

Hands and weeds…words on my mind fairly often lately…truly ever since the garden burst into full-blown growth of summer with the rest of the countryside. Our hands are slowly gaining the stiff, leathery feel that weeding yields, while my right index finger sports this year’s callous and every crevice harbors a minuscule deposit of dirt and weed-juice. I could scrub those useful extremities raw this very minute and the stains of labor would cling tenaciously to them yet. Then there are the weeds. Cramped and ugly things that crawl all over the garden and make it look like panorama jungle to scale.
I wrote that word, “weeds”, and then realized that I honestly wasn’t sure what I mean by it. So I went and looked it up. Now pardon me while I explain the need to investigate such a common English word.
Words have always been a favorite topic of mine, so etymology was a hobby I cultivated easily. Since some have noted that I “must like to write,” it may come as a surprise to find that I went through a long season where I could not enjoy grammar and spelling, no matter how hard I tried. The rules of the English language were like cobwebs to me and I believed they got in the way of what I really wanted to do…write. (Yes…go ahead and chuckle.)
My ever-tactful mother was unrelenting in this respect, and having a very practical and mathematical mind, established a foundation of grammar under all my whimsies of composition. In the morning of my education, I misspelled so many words in my headlong rush for creativity she told me to find them in my own work rather than marking them in red herself. (A wise mother makes her child his own drill-sergeant…and saves red ink.)
Unfortunately, I rebelled at first and brought the same misspellings back day after day for inspection. Rather than slapping an F on the paper (I never got an F because Mama refused to accept badly done work) she sent me away with my (current) good friend Noah Webster to look up every word in my composition…in order. “The…long…white…house…was…” you get the idea. After a few trials of this kind, I discovered two things. The first was that it saves time to be more selective with your letters. The second I found while resting my cramped brain on a page-full of those introductory remarks at the beginning of Webster’s dictionary we never read, trying to muster the resolve to look up “the”. I realized I was staring at a paper on etymology. I was swallowing the last line before I knew I had sipped the first and the world of language spread out before me like a sublime view from a mountain top. End of rant.
So…in every-day terms, “weed” gets its origin from Old English words like “uueod” or “weod” meaning “grass” or “herb”. By the way, don’t you love the fact that the letter “W” was originally a double “U”?
Weed has only more recently (in the last few hundred years) become a generic term associated in one sense with noxious and nuisance plants. For example, the King James Bible (from 1611) translates a Hebrew word in the book of Job meaning “stinking plant or noxious weed” as “cockle”. Apparently cockles were obnoxious in seventeenth century England. I cultivated their modern counterpart as a cut flower in my garden last year. Weed, then, in its modern sense, is a relative term…since it is applied to plants that are simply more resilient and fast-growing than those we cultivate for food and fiber, etc. (Hence the phrase “growing like a weed”.) This being the case…I would like to introduce you to some plant-acquaintances of mine. Namely: those I term “weeds.”


Purslane (Portulaca oleracea) is cultivated in many regions for culinary use. It is used in salads, stir-fry and even soup. It is my personal weeding nemesis, since it is nearly impossible to pull up by the roots, leaves sticky juice all over your hands, and has malevolent tentacle branches that spread over everything. It is just beginning to come up now and will flourish through July and August.
Pigweed (Red root - Amaranthus retroflexus) is also cultivated for culinary purposes. They make a dish called “thoran” with it in India. It is my personal favorite in the weed category because it pulls easily and doesn’t make a fuss about dying. It is one of the first things up and one of the last things to die in the fall. Incidentally, Purslane, Pigweed and Lambs-quarters/Goosefoot are all “related” and are often referred to interchangeably as “pigweed” because they were at one time or another used as pig-fodder.
Lambs-quarters or Goosefoot (Chenopodium album) is also…that’s right…cultivated for food in India. Very hard to pull, will grow four feet tall, has a hard stem that hurts your fingers and contributes to pollen related allergies.
Scotch Thistle (Onopordum acanthium) is believed to have originated in North America as an ornamental plant! I suppose they tolerated the spines in their landscaping to enjoy the biannual violet flowers. It is versatile in nature…apparently used for medicinal and household purposes. Believe it or not, some used to eat the receptacle of the flower the way we eat artichokes. And of course many of you may recognize it as the national emblem of Scotland (hence the name).

Kentucky Bluegrass (Poa pratensis) is a native meadow grass that many of you know as lawn grass. It gets the name from its blue flowers which appear if you don’t mow it regularly…or pull it up. Along with Crabgrass (which has seeds that can be toasted and ground for flour) the species can populate an area very quickly. In the fall our garden ends up looking like a prairie thanks to these grasses.


Goldenrod (Solidago canadensis) – Well, I won’t burden you with the nearly endless list of common ailments this plant addresses…everything from kidneys to sore throats. It is more than one state’s state flower. More interesting yet is the fact that Thomas Edison found a way to extract rubber from the leaves and had tires of goldenrod rubber on the Model T his friend Henry Ford gave him! It pulls up very easily and looks like a little Christmas tree when it is young.

Milkweed (Asclepias amplexicaulis) while a main source of food for Monarch butterfly larva, is toxic to grazing animals. It is used medicinally and recently cultivated for filling pillows. It leaves a sticky “milk” on your hands when you pull it, and is not nearly as invasive as other weeds.

Pinkweed (Polygonum pensylvanicum) , named for its flower, is a native species and was as used for medicinal purposes as well. It is almost identical to its European counterpart, Lady’s Thumb. It is also far less invasive than most weeds.



There are more I could have mentioned...but I thought better of it. To many, weeds can get...obnoxious. I would love to hear about the weeds I am sure some of you deal with every day! In the midst of all this fuss over the garden, the pigs are growing apace and the chickens are on their last few weeks of happy chicken-ness on the pasture. The regal iris is past its prime and gives way to the flamboyant blooms of high summer.
Signing off with a (literally) green thumb!
Craig, Karen and The Six Arrows

P.S.  We are cleaning up in wake of incredible storms that came through the south east corner of Minnesota last Thursday night. After the deluge, Daddy was out until 4 am with the boys closing roads because of flooding over bridges in the Cannon Falls area. They said the sight of giant 100 foot trees hitting bridges like a battering ram and then disappearing into the raging river was spectacular and sounded like thunder! The Farm had a few casualties: strawberries have hail damage, sugar snap peas have white spots from hail, and the hen pen shifted in the wind and hurt a hen. Everything else pulled through surprisingly well. We are thankful!

A Six Arrows Farm Update

We have a new list...well...The List this time of year really takes on a life of its own, so I'm not sure whether we have it or it has us. In any case, this list comes a size large, so you have to make the time grow into it and "fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run" as Rudyard Kipling advises. With categories for the farm, a fast approaching open house and various individual projects, it looks something like this:

Freeze cornbread for the Cornbread Salad

Wash the floors

Cut the dead tree down

Make dinner

Clean the kitchen

Quartet rehearsal for a wedding

Plant tomatoes

Weed and mulch gate flower bed

Make dinner

Clean the kitchen

Plant foxgloves and wisteria vine

Throw in a load of laundry

Put in the pig fence

Make dinner

Clean the kitchen

Burn brush

Order bread making supplies for market

Teach music lessons

Make dinner

Clean the kitchen

Clean out the neighbors goat barn

Weed the strawberries

Fix the chicken waterer

Make dinner

Clean the kitchen

Cook chickens for Chicken Cherry Walnut Salad

Write the farm update

Call about a stock trailer

Make dinner

Clean the kitchen

Get field stone for the root cellar

Clean the garage

Hill the potatoes

Make dinner

Clean the kitchen

...

Notice the consistent and regular nature of dinner and clean up? In the near-frenzy of work on the farm, one of the few things that maintains sanity and regularity is mealtime. The fact that suppertime during this season is rarely at the same hour shouldn't come as a surprise. The kind of regularity our meals lend is of a different type. Whether it happens at five or eight, it gathers us together, comforts our stomachs, clears our minds, reminds us of the Provider of our daily bread, inspires aspiring cooks...and common table courtesy usually enforces a blessed silence for a short time (in most of us at least).

And then there is the kitchen, that place most of us know every inch of. Dishcloths are often a reliable barometer of the advancing state of one's kitchen. Ours are mostly threadbare and tend to be either mortifyingly grubby or bleached clean, with very little time transpiring between the two states. In a proper sense, perhaps our kitchen could be called threadbare. At the very least, it is well used. We know we are busy when the plates and cups go from the drainer to the table without touching the cupboard shelves. With at least three and more often eight people using the space regularly (mostly at the same time), it would be a stretch to say that there is a place for everything...or that everything is in its place. From a practical perspective, the geographical layout is deplorable and more than one of the outlets is finicky enough that you have to "nurse" it to get electricity (perhaps related to the frequent blown fuses; usually the result of trying to run three waffle irons or two crock pots at the same time). In spite of these minor glitches, this is where we are perfecting the art of efficiently feeding a large family on a healthy, economical, sturdy and even palatable diet. :)

Our kitchen is no bigger than it ever was, yet as we grow and change, it remains the hub of activity in our household. The attraction it commands it is as palpable as it is enigmatical. No one has ever really been in our home until they have come into the kitchen; preferably at the high tide of production when most of the doors and drawers are open and something is splashing over the top of a pot while half a dozen knives are clattering and at least three conversations are in progress. It is one of the less "beautiful" places in the house, but I can't tell you how many deep conversations are held over that battered counter, how many tears have been shed into the old stained sink, how many merry laughs have rung from the jumbled cupboards. Who could count the cups of coffee, loaves of bread, cans of tomatoes, burnt pies, broken mugs, favorite cookies, caramelized onions, mountains of dishes, saucepans of gravy, cut fingers, soggy hands, watering eyes, tingling noses and savoring tongues that are laid to its account. Never for a moment believe that kitchen work must be drudgery. Only drudges can make it so. Families can tear down the walls that divide them and establish the cornerstones of society while building the structure of a cake or reducing a mountain of dishes.

Around the old traditions and familiar habits of the home grow the changeful days, full now of new life, new plants, new gardens, new chicks, new pigs, new projects, new businesses. We even added a new bread variety for the Farmer’s Market along with the standbys and favorites...the common man’s Whole Grain Pumpernickel! My favorites are still the Rosemary Garlic with cheese in it and Aubrey’s famous Cardamom Braid. As you can probably imagine, by late morning every Friday, just walking in the house will make you hungry.

While your back was turned the woods tangled themselves together in a summer jungle and the grass grew rank and file all over the heated soil. The iris unfurled his shimmering walls and donned his feathery waistcoat and gold lined lavender suit. Leaves on the tree heights cast back the sun's golden eye from their smooth faces and shimmer on the breath of May breezes. The cool regal halls of the forest echo with a myriad chorus of birds and shelter the secrets of their nests. Every bit of the world, the vast sky, the fine dust of the blossoms of fruit, the jeweled feathers of the rooster, just shout "Glory!" day and night. This is the time when the farm is at its best, greenest, cleanest, when the shadows dance through hours of golden sunlight, while the bee hums his own tune at every flower. Here you can learn from the growing things what it is to be busy while at rest. The peaceful and idyllic surroundings disguise a ceaseless hum of energetic industry in the folds of their splendor. In fact, whether most know it or not, no one could truly enjoy the apparent glory if it were not for the apparent presence of effort.

Signing off to clean up for dinner!

Craig, Karen and The Six Arrows

Six Arrows Farm Update

“How doth the little busy bee

Improve each shining hour?”  - Isaac Watts

Ben “suited up” and cleaned our bee hives with Charlie yesterday in preparation for the two new swarms we just picked up.  I attended the operation with camera in tow to capture the process of establishing the hives.

A few dead bees from last year still clung rigidly to the frames and some leftover honey dripped lazily from a crack in a corner.  Last year’s leaves and dirt, the workers and the yield, mingled and languished in sordid decay around the base of both hives.  The whole picture would have cut a terribly melancholy figure if the steady punctuated hum the of the waiting swarms hadn’t added a distinct element of urgency.  Thousands of bees caught up together in a teeming net can make a respectable quantity of buzz.  A few solitary workers had escaped the general trap and were settled along the lid and around the outside of the net droning on a slightly different note than their kin and already sporting tell-tale bulging pockets at the knees. Charlie and I made a timely retreat to a safe distance just before Ben released the bees, since we aren’t sure how “bee-immune” we are and weren’t inclined to find out with a confused and over-crowded swarm.

Amazing to me is the passionate desire of the bee to work.  They do it to survive, but there is no “bare minimum” of labor for the intense little reapers.  They all work as one with rapidity, skill, and voracity.  Bees not only do what they must, they love to do it, eating up the space between flower and hive with a high-pitched song.  The glory of God is made evident in the bee.  But someone else said it better than I in the words of a child; which is what one tends to feel like after hearing the first thing about bees.  I will let her tell you:

“Now, here’s something to remember about a bee itself – say a worker bee, because it would be the one that would carry the pollen.  …a worker bee has got two stomachs, a little one more inside for itself, and a way bigger one more on the outside for the hive.  Back on its abdomen every worker bee has got four pockets to secrete wax, and every worker has got baskets on its legs to gather pollen in, besides the nectar that they carry in their stomach for the hive.  …  Every one of them is covered with hair that is long for a bee and it is soft and fine and when the workers go down into Mr. Male Iris to get nectar for their two stomachs and to fill their pollen baskets, the hair all over them fills with the pollen, too, and it is the law, because of God, that when any bee starts out to gather nectar and pollen, it never mixes one flower with another.  You can see it now, can’t you?  When  the worker bee gets the pollen from Mr. Iris all over his hair and then goes on to get pollen from Miss Iris, the hair is going to scatter the pollen for her, that’s going to make the good seed come, ‘cause the bees do the flower’s courting for them.  That’s a reason besides honey as to why bees are so useful.”

“One time I asked the Bee Master if I couldn’t see God and if I couldn’t touch Him, how was I going to know that He was here.  And he said, ‘Because of the hair on a bee.’   So that’s one of the ways you can know.

Then there are a lot of ways you find out about God on account of how He made Queen bees.”

“The way a Queen comes to be a Queen, is this way: In a little cell all fixed up for it, the Queen bee of a hive puts an egg and she tells the workers, ‘I want this egg to be a Queen.’  The workers get busy and make the royal jelly.  That’s another thing the people who write the bee books haven’t figured out.  They don’t know just what royal jelly is or how it is made.  But the workers know.  God showed ‘em how when He made ‘em.”

“…the new Queen goes to the door and she walks out of it backward.  She goes away a little piece and she comes back to it three or four times.  God told her to do that so she would be mighty sure when she came home from the first long flight she has ever made she would know her own door.”

“[The Bee Master] says the only name for that Master Mind is God.  He doesn’t see any use in trying to dodge God and side-step Him and call Him ‘The Spirit of the Hive’ and Instink and Nature and things like that.  He says a great scientist, one of the best, almost went crazy trying to do that very thing.  His name was Charles Darwin, and the Bee Master says C.D. would have been a heap better…if he’d been willing to put God in where He belongs.  He says when God does anything ‘with such care, and puts so much thought in it, and deals out such splendid justice’ as there is in a beehive, that a wise man will just take off his hat and lift his eyes to the sky and very politely he will say, ‘Just God.’”

~from The Keeper of the Bees by Gene Stratton-Porter

I concur with the “Bee Master” more ever day. 

The bunches of onions are banked in rows, sleeping until warmth and light and rain pour coax them to life.  Herb pots in the greenhouse are supplied with sturdy little plants reaching eagerly for the sun, beautiful in form and casting savory aromas.  If you want to hear a good sermon on the nature of God on the farm, all you have to do is step outside the door into His world and listen.

With Gene Stratton Porter “I say, ‘Just God!’”

Craig, Karen and The Six Arrows