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.

A Six Arrows Farm Update

I threw the windows open this morning to let in spring and I wish you could be here.  The quiet sky is casting a soft gray blanket and filtering gentle light over a brown world misted with hazy green.  Things can't wait to come alive now.  Everything is reaching and striving and opening into the warmth.  It is all so vulnerable and hesitant, soft and new.  Composers have been writing music for spring for centuries.  Some of my old favorites...Vivaldi's Spring, Mozart's "Spring" String Quartet, Copland's Appalachian Spring are dedicated in title to the season.  But even these fall short of the real symphony that swells between last year's death and this year's life.  The story of spring is almost too delicate for any expression louder than a whisper.  While seemingly cavalier, the relentless and yet winsome power obviously on display makes carelessness and pomp equally graceless.

Poetry meets prose where pleasant weather meets reality.  Talk goes back and forth, some eager, some dubious.  What does a Minnesota grower do with a March Spring?  The orchard owners are justly concerned that an April or early May frost will kill the buds which are so enthusiastically bursting.  Last year, a similar weather pattern eliminated much of the fruit crop in this region.  On the other hand, if the frost wipes out the first of the weed bed in the garden before it goes to seed, we will of course be grateful.  And a lengthened growing season with good rain and sun can only help most crops.

Daddy announced a desire to do some brush clean-up over lunch and the prospect of grubbing around out of doors was so tantalizing that I enlisted myself almost before he finished laying out his plan.  I love to be in the middle of it, when all the world is living the first creation again; when the newborn green creeps up like an old friend and fills my senses with memories come alive; when my eyes drink the lush colors to their dregs.  I glory in the comical way the hens peck and cluck out their satisfaction across fresh turf while the rooster crows stentorianly simply because he can.  I am mesmerized by a single bud, standing there willing it to grow when I know for a surety that I can do nothing to make it mature or drink when I water, and yet it surely will because it lives avidly in obedience to it’s Creator.

To tear away at the old to make way for the new; to rake out, sweep up, and carry away what is chaff and press down and train up and feed what is good is in our nature.  Man is made neither as a foreign creature to destroy, nor a passive member to let lie the world in which he is established.  He is made a husbandman to make it better.  All around the farm are evidences of “natural” decay.  The beauty of untouched wilderness is not in its native disorder, suffocation, and barrenness, but in the potential it is blessed with: a will to grow and come alive under the hands of skilled and diligent caretakers.  That which languished in rampant chaos begins to take on the beauty of shape and form.  The accumulation of death and decay are set aside to give way to redoubled life and strength.  

The soil obeys the laws written in it and knows the hand of man as it’s appointed ruler.  It responds with fertility and abundance under a good steward and withering and desolation under a lazy or greedy man.

Proverbs 20:4 says “A sluggard does not plow in season; so at harvest time he looks but finds nothing.”
So here we go to "plow in season".

Craig, Karen and The Six Arrows

Six Arrows Farm Update

Remember farm dinners?  Some of you may…the kind where good real food is abundant, jell-o with fruit and whipped cream is a prerequisite and coffee and bread pudding follow in abundance.  The ponderous farm table where you can talk for hours companionably on every topic, profound or mundane.  Aubrey added strawberry jell-o with bananas and whipped cream to our hospitality menu last night.  Dressed up in a pretty bowl and garnished with citrus zest, it reigned like a sovereign over 

every other viand on the table and completed a tradition that has grown through generations of family meals.  Farm dinners are wonderful not because they are remarkably extraordinary, but comfortable.  Like afghans and hot buttered toast and frost in the corner of the window and sun warming the floor in the morning and gloves drying by the stove.  Like that splash of summer on our toast when plumb jam glows like gems on golden bread, or the way my heart leaps with Cappy every morning that she hurtles bright-eyed out of her kennel and eats up snow with her pattering paws.  These are little “gratefulness-es” that grow out of great joy in small blessings.

People often notice the aroma of the fire when they step through our door.  We added another smell last night and Daddy knew it when he came home, farmer-man that he is.  Soil.  Not to be confused with dirt, its spent and lifeless counterpart, soil is pungent with life.  The scent is full and rich and tangy with a vitality that grows into the air and makes you sit up straight for a better sniff.  Aubrey and I buried our hands in it and shook it into flats last night.  Pressed down and running over we filled the cells and hollowed beds for those plain brown time capsules of rosemary and thyme, sage and chives.  

The skills that arise from planting seeds are like any other seemingly simple proficiencies.  They grow from simple lists of factual knowledge into real understanding.  When you know how much to tamp the soil in a flat so that roots will go deep and strong without suffocating; when the arrangement of seeds in each cell is precise; when you can’t bear to wear gloves because you prefer to test the consistency of the earth with your finger tips; when you 

can measure how many black grains of thyme are between your thumb and finger; this is when you begin to understand and really love sowing seed.

Huge flakes whirled all afternoon yesterday and flashed in the sun from the ground this morning in a velvety blanket.  My favorite part of winter mornings are those snow-shadows of baby-est blue that scatter over every dip and rise, cling to the rims of drifts, sink into the caverns of boot-tracks and strike out from the foot of every tree.  Having firmly established my love of winter, I now feel free to admit that I am guilty of putting very green and glowing summer pictures on my desktop.  The bubbling water-falls and rolling pastures smile at me a bit mockingly, I’m afraid.  Not to worry, though.  If I can put up shots of icicles and white-capped mountains this summer, I may be able to redeem myself.  In the meantime, Aubrey and I have schemes of all kinds to cultivated that living green color we are pining for indoors.  By eating up every inch of space with terrariums and over-abundant flats of flowers and herbs, we will manage to drive Garrison (of the very tidy sort and a veritable cleaning machine) batty...until the greenhouse opens.

Craig, Karen and The Six Arrows

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?