The Shapes of Creation

I had an interesting revelation on Friday when we were picking melons. Our melons don't fit well into the bins that we use to store them, and my boss said something like "wouldn't it be great if melons were square so we could stack them easier in the bins." We mentioned that the melons should be genetically modified but realized that would be impossible. Do you know why? Because nothing in creation is a straight line. It is not square. I wonder what this has done to our psychology, when the Lord meant for us to live in a world of many shapes but we have created rigidity. I sure like the shapes. 

Trying new things

One fun thing about living on the farm is that I get some time and resources that allow me to make things from scratch and try things in the kitchen that I have never done before.

This week for the first time ever I made dill pickles from our pickling cucumbers. I am still waiting for them to ferment. I tried one on Friday(only 4 days after they were prepared) and they only tasted like salty cucumbers. It will take 1 to 4 weeks for them to be completely fermented. 

The other thing that I made this week was mozarella cheese and then ricotta cheese from the non-pastuerized milk that we get weekly from the neighbor that's a dairy farmer. It was so cool to watch the curds move away from the whey. The next day we put the cheese on our homemade pizza, which was delicious. 

Oh, and I almost forgot that a couple of weeks ago I found popcorn in the garage and I have been making popcorn directly taken from the ear on the stove. I know, it sounds ancient, but it's way better than microwave popcorn!

Crop Walks

Every Thursday morning on the farm we have a "crop walk." During this time we walk around the field and talk about what's been done in the past week and what needs to be done over the next week (which is actually from Thursday until Monday because on Tuesday we start the 2-day harvesting madness again). One fun part of the crop walk is that we get to see the progress of the vegetables. It is so crazy how fast that they grow. We also get to try some of the vegetables. This weeks crop walk I ate:

Brussel Sprouts

Celery

Tomatoes

Cucumber

Cayene Peppers

The best one was the celery because it didn't taste like the water filled celery from the grocery store. It had all of these delicious flavors in it that I never knew existed in celery. Yummmm.

Creation

The only thing louder than destruction is creation.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...and God said "Let there be light"...then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds...Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness"... The God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground -- everything that has the breath of life in it -- I give every green plant for food." And it was so. God saw all that he made, and it was very good..." Genesis 1 (selected verses).

The Lost Knowledge of "development"

I have been reading some of Wendell Berry's essays in "The Gift of Good Land." Berry inspired me to learn how to farm after I read "The Memory of Old Jack." I appreciate his critique on culture as it relates to agriculture. In one essay called "Three Ways of Farming in the Southwest" he describes the Papago culture of the Arizona desert:

"In response to their meager land, the Papago developed a culture that was one of the grand human achievements. It was intricately respectful of the means of life, surpassingly careful of all the possibilities of survival. Their ideal was 'survival, not triumph' -- so Charles Bowden writes of them in Killing the Hidden Waters. The Papago communities were at once austere and generous; giving and sharing were necessarily their first principles. The people needed each other too much to risk individualism and dissent. For, as Bowden says, 'The man who hoarded, who saved, who said he and his blood would make it on their own...such a man led his kin to extinction. In the Sonoran desert a man could get and edge, but never savor control. Power came from toil and could only  be stored in other human beings."

"The result was paradoxical: in these almost impossible circumstances, the Papago acieved what Bowden accurately cals a "society of abundance." THe poverty of our "affluent society" never existed among them. The old-time Papago lived close to the Christian morality that we profess, and far indeed from the morality that we practice. We could do worse than put ourselves to school them. "Having little," Boxedn says, "they shared all." And they lived in harmony with their place: they "lived the net yield of the desert's hydrologic budget."

"Contact with white people brought many changes, of which the most radical may have been wells drilled into the aquifers that underlay the desert. But this was a part of a government program that also included livestock production and education. Bowden notes the irony in this effort, which proposed to bring self-sufficiency to a people already marvelously self-sufficient. The opposite happened" 'Education devided the tribe between those who had seen the tractor and those who had not. Stimulation of the cattle industry resulted in the ruin of the rangelands. The wells...cut the ground from underneath the ancient mutual dependence and sharing. A half century after the commissioners' optimistic forecast, the Papago are not respected by their white neighbors and are not self-supporting. They now have a groundwater problem, an overgrazing problem, and an economic problem. The society of abundance is gone."

-Berry (1979)

For  me this loss of a culture mirrors what our culture has become today. We do not know how to support ourselves other than with money and we do not know how to use the land.