Life on the Farm

 This month we will have been on our little farm for 4 year.....it's hard to believe that it's been that long.  After so many years of living in a little neighborhood in the Twin Cities, I still sometimes can hardly believe that this is our home.  It's silent here, it's beautiful, I can go out to the barn in my pajamas and no one will care, I can sit at the fire at night, look up at the stars and see constellations that I would never have been able to see in the city.  I hear coyotes, and owls and frogs, see pelicans fly over our house on the way to Lura Lake.  In June and July the fields are dotted each evening with fireflies, and in August the corn is close to 7'tall surrounding our property.  It's a quiet peaceful place!!                                                        Sun setting behind our little vineyard

I'm a believer in learning though experiences and this spot that the Lord has put us is the perfect backdrop for us to do just that....since moving here, we've raised chicks into hens that give us our eggs, rescued a little horse and brought his hooves back to health (and taught him some manners along the way), put in a 60' x 90' vegetable garden, a dozen fruit trees, a large perennial garden,  gathered LOTS of wood to burn in our wood burner, watched birds, raised bunnies and cats, trudged fields looking for field stone, gathered morel mushrooms, bought snowshoes to get to the barn in the winter, witnessed meteor showers, and storms, and wind like I've never seen before.





I think that life on a farm is shaping us daily....giving us discipline and character.  Out here, if dinner isn't made you don't have the option of running to McDonalds.....it just isn't an option.....you make fried eggs or a pannekoeken.   We've all learned the value of hard work....when it's 40mph wind in middle of winter and the animals need feeding you don't have the option of waiting until the wind dies down....you have to do it.  It builds a discipline in you that can only come from the work of doing.  Plowing the driveway, weeding, shoveling horse or chicken manure, hauling hay, hauling wood....all things that are hard and not really fun, but that I try to embrace.....life is fleeting, and I know I'll look back on even these things when my kids are grown and remember them fondly. 



 

Marcella and I trying to convince the chickens to go in their coop a little early so that we don't have to come back out after dark

 Marcella picking and eating a piece of rhubarb

Tiger sitting in front of the woodshed

James 4:14

Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.

 

 

Kari