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

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.