Farming Life

I have written about the realities of farming before in Some Truths About Self-Sustainable Farming which is fundamental reading for anyone thinking about it, and in more general terms also in The Truth About Farming.

Even then though, I did in both cases express the sentiment generally that:

Oh… one last point… if you ARE prepared to face all that stuff… is it worth it?

Absolutely, yes!

But let it not be said that despite the difficulty, such a setup is not rewarding. In terms of providing all the food you need for your family, this is probably the most difficult setup, even with a tractor and good earth, it will be long days throughout the year to be fully self-sufficient. But the rewards of seeing your family grow, and become increasingly capable, able and most of all, free of the mental rot of the world, is incomparable in terms of the sense of fulfilment and satisfaction it gives.

Today was such a day.

I have been busy with a bunch of things but Easter was finally free and we just relaxed as a family. And today, none of us even thought about April Fool’s. We had breakfast then we were all outside. I trimmed the grape vine by the house that had started trying to imitate a giant squid from the deep, my wife cleared the back patio of wood chips from my wood chopping, the kids alternated playing on the trampoline and discussing the philosophy of spiders, the four year old and his three year old sister watched a large spider near the back door for a while.

Discussing it, hoe big it was and so on. Then the little dude said he wanted to kill it and I told him not to, and asked why he wanted to kill it. He said because it looked scary. Which internally brought up an ancient and familiar sensation from my youth. Like his father and his grandfather, he has the instinct to fight against anything that frightens him. But I hope to guide him better than I was and get him to be more like his great-grandfather, my grandfather. That man was faced fears too, but with a calm, dignity and precision that I wonder if he was ever truly afraid of anything. And his humility at the end of his life was heartbreaking.

I watch my son and see in him the calm and reasoned logic I too have. His lack of self-pity and just observation of things as they are and I know he can be better than I was, even if in those things he as I am. He has the same curiosity I have and general lack of fear, so I need to help him make that calm his strength, for when our passions or frustrations overwhelm us, I hope to impart on him the sense of things I had to find on my own, to stay focussed and calculating even when things are hard. To know when to walk away instead of fight everything, and to not be afraid to fight when needed, and to do so relentlessly and smartly when you do.

I tell him having a scary face is not a good enough reason as the spider hasn’t done anything to him. Yet.

He stays there with his sister observing it a long while as they talk about it. Then he picks up a little stick and puts it close enough to the spiders to make it move and the next thing I hear is him saying:

“He moves so fast!” And his sister:

“Yes, it’s not fair is it!”

“Yeah we move so slow, and he is so fast!”

Later she calls him over like a proper little English lady, keep in mind we are all outside already and she is on the front patio and calls out to her brother by name, and when he looks at her she says:

“Let get some fresh air.”

He comes over and she gets him to sit next to her on the step. There is a little breeze going, so that is what she meant.

He sits a while then says if they should get back to mom, as they were helping her clear the back patio. She says “No, leave mom sit here a bit,” with a dismissive wave of her hand towards her back.

Later the littlest one, excited to be allowed to walk around on her own decides she’s going exploring down the hill, and I doubt she would have stopped until she got to the forest at the bottom. So I go to her and distract her by showing her some daisies. They are everywhere and I pick one and tell her “Fiore.” Flower.

She smiles and starts plucking a few and giving them to me. I sit with her and she communicates her joy and fascination with this new thing, flowers. When she saw a light cream/yellow butterfly she pointed at it and went “Oooohhh”.

And with that link I have with all of them, I sense her wonder at it. And am grateful. We get old and hardened and miss the joy of the miracle of butterflies flying around the flowers in the fish pond.

I need to make some wood for next winter and I know now we need five tons a year. It’s hard work using the big chainsaw but the second large tree I had to cut down is still there from when I took it down in winter. I decide to experiment. I want to use the bigger one I cut down the year before to make a table. A long, slightly thinner table, that fits in our giant kitchen/entry space without making it a slight effort to squeeze past the chairs when there are people sitting in them.

So I’ll use this one to practice slicing thick slabs out of it. And I will shape this one into a canoe, for the little ones to get in and play at being red indians, or whatever.

The wife is impressed with how flat the plane I do get is. The kids to their hidden Easter egg hunt today because they crashed yesterday before we got organised. They amazingly didn’t OD on chocolate. Mostly because the boy has long time preferences, and he likes to save some for later. His sister has since learned to do the same from watching and copying him.

We eat dinner all together and I am not sure when she did it, but she has managed to put out salad, shaved carrot, kebabs, and rice and also arrange a selection of cucumber and tomato and other bits so each of our freaky children and their little weirdness about food and how they like it are all taken care of. The little Prince will not eat from the same plate for a different food that had juicy stuff in it. Logical enough. His sister will eat about anything but only one type at a time. He doesn’t like egg yolk but loves the rest of the egg (I was and mostly still am the same).

The baby is 15 months old but eats with a fork now and loves to show us. Her little face light up when you understand her and she claps in joy. And when she gets upset with you, her stink-eye is second to none.

She grabs my jumper from the chair and carries the thing, bigger than her in every direction, brings it to me and says “Daddy!” and hands it to me.

She loves the cats outside, same as the slightly older sister did at her age. She manages to stroke them, and just like her sister before her manages to kiss the cats on the mouth too.

They have a bath later, and the little one with her mom. We clean the kitchen and put them to bed. Their eldest sister reads them a couple of stories.

The world may be going to Hell, and it is hard, and money is tight, which for me is a worry for them mostly, as a single man I had times where all I had to eat for a week at a time was a bag of flower, salt and tap water. And I know I can always sort myself out, but I don’t want them to feel deprived of anything. Even so, my wife is on side and in tune, they are happy and love the outside. Their big sister is a big help with the baby which she loves, and with the other two as well.

She’s nearly as tall as my wife now, at age twelve, and she’s doing very well in school and taking part in some local activities put on by the Novus Ordo Church. She know the differences and says her prayers correctly, not in the bastardised Novus Ordo “prayers”. I think she may want to go on to learn them in Latin too, bit I don’t push her, only answer her questions when she asks, and she surprises me now telling me the history St. Don Bosco and so on. She sings and her voice is really good. I know because I am ignorant of music but I was told by a professional singer I saw briefly, that apparently I have an ear that picks up tonalities and differences in sound that only 15% of people do. She’s started teaching the three year old how to play the keys on her electronic keyboard.

Really what’s hard?

Working 13-15 hour days away from them every day five days a week is what’s hard.

Living in a city is hard.

Chasing and banging a half dozen different women in a week or two is hard.

Not having children is the hardest of all. I started so late. My wife and I discuss it sometimes. How many would we have if we’d started the very first time we met nearly twenty yers ago, instead of getting together properly only 7 years ago.

A dozen of them? Who knows. But I also know we were neither of us ready then. And God has acted so much in all this journey, I have no doubt his protective veil was over us the entire time until it we were ready.

So, yeah. Farming life is beautifully and incomparably “hard”. Just like having children is “hard”. Or being feminine if you’re a woman is “hard” (because criticised and ridiculed). Or being a man who is still a man is “hard” (because they are literally trying to make it illegal to actually simply be a male with his own set of testicles still in place instead of having one in a jar on the bedside table next to their shrewish wife, and the other cut up into a million pieces to try and feed the frenzy for political correctness, feminism, equality and just generally inverting the truth for a total dystopic and demonic feminist/gay/tranny agenda).

So my advice is this:

Don’t believe the LARPing liars and grifters about the idyllic farm life, but also don’t believe the doom and gloom nihilists.

Plan properly as best you can, but ask me if I regret any of it? My only answer is that I wish I had started sooner, that’s all.

[ X ]

This entry was posted in Social Commentary. RSS 2.0 feed.