First day back in school

Yesterday was my first day back in school after ... how many ... 10 years? I'm teaching a class at Wheaton College called Data Analytics. I hope to impart some enthusiasm for statistics to the people in the class as well as give them access to the tools that will help them develop the skills that enable them to turn enthusiasm into honest answers to useful questions.

I have 15 students and 1 faculty member whom I will share the semester with. They have a variety of hopes for the future. There are a couple from economics, one who is going to be an actuary, quite a number of math majors. It'll be fun having such a diverse group. I'm excited about giving them a way to "think about statistics" that will help them grasp the ideas in an intuitive manner.

I was surprised at how draining I found teaching a two-hour class to be. My Parkinson's affects my voice, so I found as class wore on that I had to work harder to make myself heard and to speak clearly. It was a sober reminder that just because I'm doing what the Father wants me to do doesn't mean that doing it will be easy. I can't let my comfort or convenience be a measure of whether I'm doing the right thing. If anything, the boxing training that has been such a help for my Parkinson's has made it clear that hard work and inconvenience is good for me in many ways.

The College encourages instructors to incorporate some form of spiritual content into their teaching. I am going to begin each class with a meditation on a verse - typically one that I memorized and have lived with for many years. Yesterday we began with Ephesians 2:10: "For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we would walk in them." I reviewed the different stages in my working career and highlighted how God often prepared me for the next step ahead of time in ways whose significance I was oblivious to at the time. The lesson to draw from that is not to try to become less oblivious! It is to do my best to be faithful to what God is doing in my life today and trust in His Sovereignty, that He is doing today exactly what I will need to be prepared for tomorrow. Both on a macro and a micro scale He has prepared beforehand good works for me to do.

Perfect summer day in the country

A gorgeous late summer morning - the perfect day to get the supers of honey off Janine's five hives.  We've started working our bees collaboratively this year.  Solomon said, "Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their toil, for if they fall, one will lift up his brother sister."  We're "old ladies" to be doing heavy bee work but we love the bees so we work together and find that having four eyes to look at things, two brains to figure out what to do in situations we encounter in the hive and two sets of muscles to lift really makes it doable for us.  This is the day of the year that requires the hardest work - taking off the full supers of honey.  A full super weighs about 80 pounds and we had a lot of supers to get off.  It's also better if we leave the bees IN the hive and not take them with us when we take the supers to the honey house - not a simple job!  A bee and his honey are not easily parted!  We removed well over 500 pounds of honey today and wrangled about a million bees in the process.  No injuries occurred although I'm sure we will have sore muscles tomorrow.  It was a joy to work with a dear friend, both of us awed at these beautiful, tiny creatures and harvest the fruits of their and our labor.  On a perfect summer day...in the country...

Late yesterday I went out to check the milkweed pods and was thrilled to find two monarch larvae on the plants.  I consider even two as a "successful breeding year", although I suspect there are quite a few more that we don't see or find.  It's good we let the milkweed grow undisturbed!

And there was also an adult monarch sipping nectar on the blue vervain in the prairie plants.

Here's the latest in Kenji's "hot harvest", a ghost pepper - one of the hottest!  Even it's form and surface seem to be warning you that there's fire within!

Late summer caprese salad with balsamic reduction by Anne.  Tomatoes and basil from the garden.  Cheese from the store.  Give us time...we may do that, too.

There's a cicada chorus outside, the sun is going down and the day is winding to its close.  What joys will tomorrow bring?  Thank you, Lord, for your gifts - for friends, for bees and butterflies, tomatoes and peppers, for sunshine and then rest at day's end.

Last breath before school starts

I'm going to be back in school this fall, teaching a class on data analytics at Wheaton College. I'm in the midst of the last intense spurt of preparation - but today is Sunday and a good time to take a break and "smell the roses" ... or wildflowers, as the case may be.

The walk starts out in the living room. Yesterday we added a couch to our two love seats, which you can just see in the lower right corner. We had friends over for pizza last night and we had to point out the new couch to them later in the evening. It fit in so well that it seemed like it must have always been there, which is a good sign. Now all I need to do is finish hooking up the chimney on the new wood stove and we'll be ready to hunker down and enjoy the fall and winter.

The early sun gilding the living room.

Stepping out the front door, the steps down into the yard are flanked on both sides by natural prairie plants, as if standing at attention for review.

Each week or two the selection of blooming plants changes. If I knew them as well as Becky, I could probably use them instead of the calendar to mark the passage of summer.

The tulip poplar vies with an oak on the northwest of the house for the designation of "favorite tree". I think of it as the "resurrection tree". It was struck by disease many years ago and died. The following year I was going to cut the corpse down, but before I could get to that a new shoot came up from the stump ... and that shoot has turned into this beautiful specimen. I doesn't like Roundup and when Roundup is sprayed on the field across the road from us, the tree suffers a shock. (According to the local farmers, "Roundup doesn't drift" - rrrriiiiiight. We're hoping it will be hardy enough to be a survivor. 

Even the mushrooms that grow out of the mulch have a beauty of their own.a

This is the view from the guest parking leading up the curved path to the house. We especially love the grasses on either side of the path behind the milk cans. They look like a fog of grass seeds, waving in the breeze.

Milkweed pods. Milkweed is, well, a weed. But it happens to be the one plant that monarch butterflies prefer, so we rejoice over every one that we find.

Barns seem so timeless. The waning moon is in the upper left. I was up in the night briefly and the moon was so bright it cast shadows across the yard behind the house.

In April this view of the house showed a house on a rocky dirt hill. Now the grass is filling in and the young trees have leafed out. Next year it will look like the house has always been sitting on a grassy rise.

As the sun creeps over the meadows and fields it casts a golden sheen over everything. The land is so flat that the sky dominates the view.

The old Nettle Creek gently winds its way from west to east across the farm. Thanks to the good rains it continues to flow, though we're already past mid August. 

Here we look from the cement "bridge" west.

Even the silver maple north of the barn seems charming in the morning sun. Hostas outline the north side of the barn.

This picture is for Micah and Lucas, who spent hours playing here at the "west creek" crossing. It's so full of water that it looks almost like a little pond.

The natural grasses give way to Steve Larson's beans in the west field.

The ducks are out and around for the morning. We've been eager to see what mix of male and female we have. It looks like two drakes and five females. The big question for us is whether they will stay with us or migrate when winter comes. (Becky is hoping for "migrate". No need to feed 7 more mouths (bills?) through the winter, when they could join others of their kind and feed themselves in warmer climes.

As I near the end of my walk, I see two of my favorite girls, animatedly gazing out the front door and discussing what the first gardening projects should be in the coming year. Next year there will be new flowers to enjoy and care for.

Thursday I'm back in the classroom after about 10 years. It'll be good to be involved with students again.

Late August - our fourth month home!

It's hard to believe we've been back here on the farm four months already - a third of a year!  We've seen most of spring and summer and I wish we'd been keeping a list of all the major projects we've tackled and conquered.  I remember that August always brought a flood of garden produce and once again that has proven true.  I've canned 24 quarts of beans and 36 quarts of tomatoes.  The freezer is full of sweet corn and more is coming next week so that will have to be canned.  There are bowls of tomatoes, cukes, squash and peppers on the kitchen counter waiting for me to fit them into the menu and quickly before they are past their prime.  Kenji is trying out the many types of hot peppers we planted for him.  None of us share his passion for hot, hotter and hottest so he has no competition for them.  

When we had 2000 prairie plants put in around three sides of the house I had obviously not considered how much effort it would be to keep them watered and weeded!  But God graciously sent rains so the watering wasn't needed, although the flip side of that is that the regular rains caused all the weed seeds to sprout.  I've been weeding a section every few days and keeping slightly ahead of the weeds.  When those 2000 little sprouts were put in it was really difficult to imagine that they would take off and cover all the ground.  They were planted on June 10 and in just over two months they have done beautifully.  There are a few bare spots where certain varieties are trying to make up their minds about thriving.   The indigos aren't sure they like where we put them and the lupines gave up the ghost in protest.  But for the most part I've been overwhelmed at how many have taken off and how many are blooming even this first year.  I love the names of these plants - royal catchfly, rattlesnake master, Ohio spiderwort, prairie tickseed, prairie dropseed, little bluestem, wild geranium, wild petunia, Joe Pye weed, obedient plant, prairie clover, Culver's root and prairie milkweed.  Many I've never seen before so it's like having a living herbarium growing around the house.

Many people prefer the neat orderliness of a traditional garden so my personal dream won't appeal to everyone.  But I love the gentle chaos of prairie plants mixing and mingling, growing around and through each other.  The grasses wave so gracefully and there are literally dozens of butterflies flitting around the blossoms every day.  To me, it's beautiful.

Pathway to the front door, lined with grasses (prairie tickseed and dropseed - I can never keep straight which is which)

Mingled with rudbeckia (the yellow flowers) are asters (the shrubby plants) that are just starting to bloom - a sure sign summer is near its end!

Maybe next year we'll have time to sit in that glider!

Little bluestem beckons you up the path to the door

I love the clouds of grasses - God is simply LAVISH with his seeds!

The lower garden - shrubs and prairie plants mixed with a couple young oak trees.  Vegetable garden in the background.

Rudbeckia, such a cheery flower

Hot pink asters.  Won't they be calling the butterflies when they are all in bloom?!?

Joe Pye weed and little bluestem grass

Obedient plant

Royal catchfly - bright red is a rare color in prairie plants

Rattlesnake master getting ready to bloom against little bluestem.

Culver's Root.  There was a big bumblebee on it but he didn't want his photo taken.

Sedges enjoying the semi-shade on the west side of the house.

Ohio spiderwort