Husking Party

My daughter came in and said, "something moved in the corn bucket." Ack!  Mice have been in the garage before.  I can't stand them.  I am a city girl, after all.  We whipped the buckets outside and stood back to kick them over.  Nothing. Whew!  Or, if there was something, it got away quickly. But, as soon as they were over we discovered mold all over the husks. 

We stopped everything and shucked the corn before the mold got into the grain.   We lost less than a quarter of the ears, and some of those were probably bad to begin with.  It's a reminder that just growing things isn't enough.  It has to be stored and preserved until we're ready to use it.

We have been reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond as part of my twins' homeschooling.  Just last week we read a chapter describing a corn husking party.  They thought it was so cool that we were having our own corn husking party. 

In the story, it was a big deal to a find a red ear, so the girls looked for them.  They would hold the husk up, guess if it was red, and then pull quickly.   When we finished the pile of colorful ears was quite spectacular.  This is grain corn native to New Mexico.

The last time this outdoor table was covered, it was in onions.  The kids had gathered up the onions and put them away in the cellar while I was busy with something else.  I thought they sorted them, but one quick check revealed they hadn't.  The onions need to be sorted so that the ones least likely to keep are eaten first.  It didn't take long in the root cellar, pulling out the ones with green leaves or thick necks into the "use first" basket.  Everything else I left loosely packed to stay dry.

My husband took several bales of alfalfa hay out to the shed, ready for when Christina has her calf and starts giving milk.  He said that she seemed to perk up when he brought it in, like she knew what it was.  This morning, we found confirmation.  He was sure he had put it back far enough that she couldn't get to it, but that big cow had twisted her head through a little opening and gotten her nose way back into that bale. This morning, my husband put another board up to keep her out.

We have our plans but others have their's.  The mold had plans for those corn husks that didn't involve leaving it for us and Christina had plans for that alfalfa hay that didn't involve waiting.  Even as we jumped in to right things, it seems that God had fun waiting for us — a surprise husking party and the comical sight of a cow twisting herself into knots for a treat.

Ghost of Parenting Present

Last night we were visited by the Ghost of Parenting Present — a daughter with the stomach flu and gastric reverse action all night long at about twenty-minute intervals.  Things finally slowed down about 6:30am.  Today we feel like ghosts ourselves.  A life in synergy with the land means that nothing we were going to do today couldn't wait until tomorrow, but the rest of family life went on.

Yesterday I made pancake syrup.  It's so easy I can't believe that I bought the high fructose corn syrup stuff for so long.  Mix one cup water,  two cup sugar (we get organic fair trade sugar from Costco), and 1/2 teaspoon mapleine.  Bring to a full boil for 2-3 minutes.  Let cool for a bit and put in jars.  We found these old syrup jars in my in-laws stuff.

The girls discovered an injured chicken today.  It was on the ground not moving and the other chickens were pecking it.  Cannibalism is a problem with chickens.  The books say that they sense when one is injured or sick and a group can quickly kill a defenseless bird.  My husband rescued the hen and moved into a pen by itself.  He put food and water near it.  My daughter asked, "are we going to have to kill it?"  We'll give it several days and see if it heals.  If not, it will have to become a stew hen.  I hate butchering.

While outside, I noticed how much the fruit trees have grown.  We planted sixteen fruit trees in the chicken pen area last spring.  We have apples, pears, cherries, plums, peaches, nectarines, and apricots.  Chickens love nothing more than bugs.  I've read that if you have chickens around your fruit trees, they will eat all the worms before they crawl up into the fruit.  We have big plans for lots of worm-free fruit without any poison spraying.

Since my other children were feeling fine, I asked them to flatten the onions.  When onions get big, they need their tops bent over for the final maturing.  In a few weeks we'll pull them out of the garden and let them dry on the patio for their final preparation before long-term storage.  Even the two-year-old got involved.

When you are a person who wants to follow God, discerning God's direction can feel like such immediate work.  Sometimes I wonder if it's more like today's work.  God welcomes time of rest and times of work.  God's opportunities aren't one chance and then gone.  Instead, if today is good, God work things out.  Or if tomorrow is better, that's OK too.  This garden is more God's work than ours, so it seems that the patterns we find there must have some reflection of their Creator.