Caring for nature and growing food becomes ingrained in a farmer. A spring is not a spring without planting. After years of farming it becomes like clockwork. Many ask me how I know when to prune, when to plow, and when to plant. When I was younger I often asked the older farmers I knew these same questions. Now with time and especially with children of my own, I understand wisdom. If you spend a lot of time with your children or your plants, you quickly begin to understand them and know what they need even before they need it. Just as there are plenty of books for parenting, there are plenty of books for farming. A first time parent often tries to prepare well by reading and learning all the details of parenting. Yet, once you are well into it, many of those books fall by the wayside and become reference material. So it goes with farming, we maintain a library of knowledge for reference, but once we have raised so many plants for so many years we seem to go back to the reference materials less and less. Just as parenting is not a job, farming too becomes a life, something that you love to do when you get up in the morning- to love and to care for those little gifts we have been given.

Farmer Dave