Tasting the Harvest in the Seed

 "The 'already' and the 'not yet.'"

Throughout my professional life that refrain was a theological abstraction - a principled affirmation that called attention to what the Creator had already accomplished among us, juxtaposed with all that was still in process but incomplete.  It was a tenet of faith; prayers of gratitude and petition clutching hands to step over the cracks in this sidewalk that is everyday life.  

But there is no abstraction here.  On the farmstead, the observation is palpably, descriptively real.  This is the "already" anticipatory season of concrete steps that makes any derivative "not yet" abundance possible.  We are busily pruning fruit trees - a wincing exercise of obligatory infanticide that trims branches already swelling with buds so that the remaining limbs can more vibrantly thrive.  Horticultural sprays will quickly follow, affording the trees every advantage against pests and disease that organic care can offer.  In the greenhouse, the first bags from the pallet of seed starting soil have been opened and blocked into trays now germinating the first of the garden seeds.  From this point forward, additional trays will be added weekly until springtime transplanting.  In the garden, Lori has been busy uprooting the dry remnants of last years vegetation clearing the way for fresh bed preparation to welcome those greenhouse seedlings that are still but twinklings in our horticultural eye.  

And if you cock your ear just right you will hear, from the deeper recesses of the barn, cheeps from the baby chicks in the brooder that will one day, if all goes well, join the older girls in the coops out back; and still later, wait their turn for time in the laying boxes to deposit their eggs.  

Such is the work "already" underway.  If we do it care-fully, attentively, patiently, good will come of it - eventually.  We might begin to find young eggs, should the chicks survive the precarities of growth and development and predation, some 20 weeks from now - August would be my guess; about the same time we are harvesting honey from the bees should their thriving and pollinating bless us with such.  Asparagus, that perennial first-fruit of spring, should begin to emerge mid-May as a "teaser" for the harvests to come - garlic dug in July, commencing the cascade of fruitings that will continue through autumn.  We won't get the first taste of tomatoes and peppers - the Crown Jewels of the garden - until August.  The trees won't offer their gifts until September and October - potatoes sometime between the tomatoes and the apples.

Today, while pruning a limb or starting a seed or feeding a chick, it all seems a long way off - a "not yet" that feels almost mythical.  

Which it will be if we don't commence the work now, already.

As with most of the harvests we hope for in life.

And beyond.