Harvest Volunteer

Today our little Calaveras Farm leaped a new hurdle, as we began harvesting our own oats.

No we don't like hot cereal that much, but we're rather hoping the cows will like our oats. A few pounds of seeds planted and tended a bit for a few months and we've now got about a ten-fold increase. Nature is generous.

Of course we've got to do our part, so I volunteered to help harvest. This is a small field, we're a small family, so we did it as it's been done for thousands of years...by hand.

I got out my nice broad-brimmed straw hat, some boots to protect against snakes, and started grabbing up fists full of oats. It was fun. Poking along and talking to Robin as we gathered the grain was the kind of gentle pastoral scene that I'd always hoped for when we first started talking about this place and what we had in mind.

Throughout the field of oats, we kept finding a different grain that seems to have snuck in with the oats. It is beautiful, it's probably good food, but it is out of place.

And then I thought about myself in the field...in my nice hat, not really knowing what I'm doing there, but happy to be there. So I feel a bit of kinship with the odd grain.

So I gathered up some of this grain volunteer for this harvest volunteer, and added it to what has become my farm hat. I'm still a bit out of place, but I fit in more and more all the time, and at least my hat is more beautiful every day.