Northern Farmer

As the week comes to a close there’s been allot of farm work accomplished around here. There’s a good start with the hay crop with around two hundred and forty round bales made so far, all without rain and in perfect condition. Monday will be the start of another week and I plan on spending Monday and Tuesday dropping more hay fields and maybe fit in a little corn cultivating around here too. I feel like some sort of a loner when I’m out there cultivating the open pollinated corn. Its impossible to really tell the difference at this point between the OP corn and the most modern corns when a person takes a gander at the fields. But I’m out there cultivating and I look around the countryside and never see anyone else doing that job any more. I figure it does the ground good cultivating it, opening it up so it can breath instead of just going through summer with that rock hard crust on the top of the soil. The corn seems to instantly take off growing faster when it gets cultivated also. The tractor is working at an idle so the fuel consumption is around a gallon an hour with the tractor I’m using. So far this year, so good. In a few days I’ll be posting photos of cultivating corn, cutting hay, raking hay, and baling hay, stay tuned, the photos are already on this computer, I just have to have some time to upload them and prepare some posts.
This summer is sure roaring by, we’ve been very, very busy as any reader of this blog might realize because of the few and far between posts. And I’m looking forward to tomorrow, Sunday, the Lord’s Day. Get the few chores I’ve got done bright and early, hoping no cattle decide to visit the neighbors, and come back in, have a second breakfast, clean up and head to our little country church. After that we’re invited to a get together in another very small town a few miles from here. Eat some Polish foods that they have for the event and generally have a good time.
There’s more stuff happening at our little church than I could ever hope to list here this summer. Thus that’ll be keeping me busy every spare moment I have also.But let me just say, I’d hate to even imagine life without that little country church. Funny, I used to figure that church took up so much valuable time, (I’m not talking about our little church that we’ve gone to for three years now), and I’d miss week after week because I was so busy. Now with the family going to an old fashioned Bible believing church it just seems like we can be more involved than ever and the farm work gets done better than ever even when so much more time is spent with church things. Twice a week minimum is spent at church. Sometimes more than that. But this is what the old timers did and that’s what we’ll do too. Nowadays it seems that every one is so “busy” getting no where that when I mention the fact that our lives are centered around that little country church most folks can’t truly understand how that all works out. They probably just figure that Tom got “religion” and is now a fanatic. Whatever, maybe they are right, who am I to say. But for thirty years I would read books about the old ways and the way we are living now is much closer to those old ways than it is to the modern ways. Sure we have cars and trucks. Sure we have a TV, (that only plays selected movies), sure we have a computer which basically is only an extension of our church life. Get rid of one or all, it wouldn’t really make a life or death difference when a person gets right down and thinks about it. I’d probably miss the computer a little for a bit, miss out on the faith matters a person can read about and also the fellowship of like minded folks. But in a few days that would be a distant memory. The computer isn’t used at all for our farming life. Selling direct has been by word of mouth, not cyberspace. E-mails are kinda handy but not totally necessary. We’d be able to live without it.
So much happening around here that I wouldn’t know where to start if I wanted to try and write it all down. So I’ll just stick to the basics as I write all tired out again. Keep on with the Bible studies later in the evening. Who knows where that’ll all lead, well I guess God does, but I have know idea, just keep on plugging. At church the kids call me pastor Tom, or preacher Tom, and so do a few adults and I just get all flustered and red faced, even more than the red face I have from being out in the sun and wind every day of the week. But truth be told, I love to preach and I love to minister, just like those farmer preachers from the old days and not so old days. I got blown away a couple of weeks ago when I found out that to be a preacher in our neck of the woods one doesn’t have to go a half a life time to a seminary or anything like that. I just listened and there was a big knot in my throat, “gulp”. But I’ve preached it for years, the fact that this country needs some good old fashioned farmer preachers that will work seven days a week farming and still pick up the Bible and preach a Sunday morning or an evening here and there during the week. That’s the way they used to do it and I believe there’s allot of room for that again. A bi-vocational preacher fits well out in the country. I don’t know where this will lead, if anywhere at all, but I can assure anyone that this will be more than interesting. I’ll leave it at that, there’s a whole lot more to it, but that’s all I’ll dwell on that for now. But me and my big mouth, or big two typing fingers will probably update on this as the months go by.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 21st, 2008 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Northern Farmer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.