Where's the corn?

Hi Everyone! I have been slacking on writing but found some time today to put a few words on “paper”. A lot of major projects have been completed in the last month or so at Simple Ridge. We have installed a fence around our garden, completed an outdoor chicken run, leveled two loads of fill dirt around our driveway, planted several fruits and vegetables, cut down limbs (and even a few small “volunteer” trees), and created a flower garden. There is probably more that I am forgetting but you get the point. Things have been busy. The good part is, come next spring a lot of what has been accomplished will not have to be done again and in fact, some of what we have done will continue to reap rewards well into the future….So, to be completely honest, I started writing this and had to leave the computer because my kids were arguing and now two days later was able to get back in front of the screen to finish my thoughts. Does this happen to anyone else? Let’s give this another shot. I mentioned that we planted a garden and like most things in our life, we go all in. Our garden is a good size and being that this is our first go-around, we made quite a few mistakes right off the bat. First, we reserved half of our garden for sweet corn which was not the problem. The new “learning opportunity” that we discovered was that planting sweet corn should not be done on May 2nd here in Iowa. Who knew the ground needed to be at least 60 degrees before planting?! Ha! Well, we do now because after 3 weeks, we realized it wasn’t going to come up. Also, we planted several vegetables by seed and besides romaine lettuce, carrots and red onions, you would have thought that we actually planted thistle seed. It was that bad! After gaining some advice from a few of our online groups, we decided to start over. I began tilling up and digging out all of the thistle, and my wife and boys replanted our sweet corn. I also went to the store and purchased several vegetable plants that were now on sale for 25% off because they should have already been in the ground at this point. We have more confidence now that we are on the right path and that everything will survive, thrive and turn into a sweet reward. Even sweeter knowing that we had to work twice as hard to receive it. The decision to declare a “do-over” and basically start from scratch was not an easy one. When we do this, we are somewhat accepting that we have failed and that maybe we were wrong with the way we thought everything should be. But once we decided and started to put in the work, we knew it was right and are better off because of it. Here I go getting a little deep again (This always seems to happen with my writing), but in life, I often make these decisions to nix the original plan, declare a “do-over”, learn a new way and go for it. We are given this blessing and we end up better for the experience and the knowledge gained. Other things at Simple Ridge that have been going extremely well (and have not required any “do-overs”) include the bees. The hives are doing absolutely amazing and we are on track to get honey in our first year! Another thing going well has been the chickens. No eggs at this point but they seem to be happy, healthy and love to be outside in their new run. Even our barn cat is getting used to us and enjoys attention and follows us around everywhere. We must be doing a few things right. There is a lot of unrest in the world as I write this and it seems we are at a point where it is time for most of us to take a look at how we have been doing things or even how we think about things and make sure it is truly the right way to continue. Like our garden, it might be time to accept that it’s wrong. If so, it is absolutely OK to declare a “do-over”, start from scratch, learn from each other, discover a new way and go for it. Just maybe we will all be better for doing so.