With this great weather we have had the last couple of days and the availability of grandkids because of spring break, we are building a 600-foot fence around our orchard to keep chickens. We are starting with 16 chickens, though a dozen are still teenagers. We will expand that until we have enough chickens to keep the grass eaten down enough so that we don’t have to mow it. With eleven people living here at our place, we go through a dozen eggs daily, which are expensive. We will grow a garden for the first time in years, and I will catch even more fish than usual. It will be fun! Growing up on a farm, we always raised most of our own food, so it will be exciting to do that again and have jobs for my grandkids to do.

One of the main strengths in my life that I received from growing up on the farm is my understanding of the laws of the harvest. One corn seed produces one corn plant. There are different kinds of corn seeds and dozens of practices and methods of growing corn, but the best of all things will be readily determined by the harvest. The harvest determines all success. Proper practices and techniques on the dairy resulted in much milk, and appropriate practices and procedures in our farming resulted in bumper crops of hay. That is the bottom line in farming: do the right things. We were always contending with weather, prices, and disease, but everybody was. We learned the right stuff from other farmers consistently experiencing bumper crops. That is the fundamental law of living life. How much we are growing in character like that of Jesus and how much fruit we are bearing in our service to God is because of living by correct principles. I learn those principles from the Bible, personal experience, and others.