Bramblings: Look beyond the storm

By BECKY NELSON
By Becky Nelson

I was pleased to see the one-legged turkey hen alive and well the other day. She was traveling with another hen, but no little ones were to be seen.

The turkeys had put on quite a display at the farm during mating time, with several tom turkeys strutting and fluffing to beat the band. I figured the turkeys would have small batches of chicks or none at all as I have read they have trouble hatching them in wet weather. I guess the weather came late enough to make a hatch possible, however. A couple of the hens seem to have large families with the chicks now turning to poults. It is obvious that another couple of hens have combined their families, as one mama has 10 or a dozen large chicks and there is a single smaller chick that runs as fast as it can all the time to keep up.

Birds of a feather flock together, I suppose.

We haven’t seen a lot of wildlife at the farm of late. The rainy season has most critters in the woods, hunkering down I imagine. We usually see a doe with fawns this time of year, but they have been lying low. We have a large raccoon visiting the corn patch, waiting for the corn to mature, as we have seen its prints in the mud at the bottom of the field. We haven’t seen any foxes or bobcats, and haven’t hear the coyotes hunting at night. It makes me wonder how they are doing in this monsoon season.

For anyone with a garden here in the south western part of the state and those elsewhere in the southern parts, growing has been tough. The extremely dry springtime made it hard for seeds to start, and then the rains came, rotting many seeds as they tried to germinate. I belong to several garden sites online, and there have been many tales of woe, with many folks replanting, and replanting, to no avail. Others are seeing all kinds of wet-weather crop losses with some gardens just puddles. We are thankful for what we are able to harvest at the farm, but there are fields where the nutrients seem to have leached out of the soil and we have had to side-dress crops with fertilizer to try to perk them up, and other fields just too wet to support a crop. The downside of being a New Hampshire farmer is always the unpredictability of the weather, but we have it nowhere near as tough as in other parts of the country and the world.

We have complained about air quality as the smoke from the western fires blanketed us, and it may well happen again. But we have little to complain about. Our world is nowhere near as wet as the land flooding in the South as relentless storms dump inches of water on their communities. We have little to complain about. We watch in horror as the COVID-19 virus spreads and runs amok in communities other than our own. We have little to complain about.

I am sure that disasters and difficulties are happening in every corner of our community as well, but we really have it pretty good. We have not been destroyed by tornadoes or ripped apart by violence. We have not washed away in floods or burned up in wildfires. We are blessed, and we need to remember that. We need to reach out to those in our very communities who are hurting or distressed, and we need to reach beyond to those without resources to combat the disasters in their lives. That is the beauty of being human. Instead of disappearing into the woods like the critters trying to shelter from the storms, we need to brave the storms and help others less fortunate in the journey.

After the storms come the beauty. Whether it be flowers or grass or leaves or rainbows, there is a silver lining to every cloud. We need to look beyond the storms and wait for the beauty. We need to be the beauty for others who are still walking beneath the storm clouds. It can be as simple as sharing a squash from your garden with the fellow down the street whose garden lies in muck. Make sure to think of others’ plight as you reap the fruit of your bounty and know that someone else’s home and hearth has been lost or is under attack.

Becky Nelson is co-owner of Beaver Pond Farm in Newport, New Hampshire. You may reach her at [email protected].