Happy Spring! This year the first day of spring appears to be rather a mixed bag of seasonal messages. The temperature is not to reach 50 today, but the sun is out sporadically and the ground is more or less thawed. Returning sandhill cranes have been squawking overhead for about a week, Canadian geese have in the past few days taken up residence in our neighbor’s soggy field next door and spring peepers have started singing in Madison, though we are still waiting to hear them in our slough. Perhaps the most sure sign that we’ve turned the corner from winter is that our chickens, ducks and goose are finally starting to lay in earnest. Eggs are back!

Eggs again! Our hens and ducks (and lone goose!) generously gift us with the first taste of spring – in a multitude of pastel colors. We are thankful…

Our birds are good harbingers of the season because we don’t heat or light their house during the winter. Chickens won’t naturally lay when the days get shorter, and though you can insure a supply of eggs during the winter by keeping light and heat bulbs on in their house, you’ll have to go outside several times a day to collect up the eggs before they freeze and crack. After our first year keeping hens, I quickly decided winter eggs weren’t worth it to me either for the electricity or the extra trips into the snow. So our girls get a rest during the winter and start laying like crazy once the weather tells them they should. Hence, they are in turn able to tell me when I can start to think about working in the gardens. It is a deep simple pleasure to be connected in this way to the animals and the earth.

After four years out in the country, I’m just barely beginning to get a feel for what the cranes and frogs and chickens can tell me about my own land and work. I read with awe the observations of other farmers like Gene Logsdon (Living at Nature’s Pace) and David Klein (Scratching the Woodchuck: Nature on an Amish Farm) whose daily walks across their fields provide them with hours of joy, entertainment and indispensable horticultural information. I feel I’m at such a disadvantage for having not been raised on this place by parents and grandparents who’d been watching it themselves for decades and casually passing the knowledge on to me. What my parents did and do pass on to me, though, is a sense of wonder among plants and nature that makes me a relatively attentive student. Plus, I’m pretty determined to see this farm become productive under our family’s care, so I’m a motivated student as well.

The trick for me is to slow down and actually absorb the signs and sure wisdom made available to me everyday. When I was 30 I had this partial Bible verse tattooed on my right wrist where I could see it multiple times a day: “BE quick to listen.” At the time, the exhortation had a lot to do with being patient with my children and open to the many cultures around me in the city. I find it still miraculously pertinent when I glimpse the black words below my hand grasping a hoe or dropping seeds or shearing sheep. So much in family life and farming life depends on listening to and learning from and thoughtfully digesting the information given to you by your environment. I guess so much depends on that in life, period.