Relative Something

We had a wonderful lunch opportunity yesterday. It was a first-time visit to the home of friends who live just a few miles north of our place. It’s not fair to compare our worlds, but it is hard not to, and it has given us a fresh perspective about everything that we have accomplished on our 20 acres.

It feels like they have achieved a dizzying amount more on their 40 acres, particularly in the realm of landscape plants and an incredible garden of vegetables and flowers. After lunch, we got a tour of their gorgeous log home –with an impressive finished basement that they did themselves– and then walked some of their property.

They hired a crew to burn one of their fields to replace it with a variety of healthy prairie plants. Many of the grasses and beneficial pollinator plants are as tall as me or taller. It is beautiful.

I am humbled by how many impressive improvements they have achieved on their land, even though they have lived there half as long as we have been at Wintervale.

I was particularly inspired to see the number of new plantings they’ve put in, including quite a few apple trees that are producing fruit for the first time this year. The produce in their garden, and the developing squash and pumpkins out beyond their modest stand of field corn, look bigger and better than anything I’ve seen in a grocery store.

When it came time for us to go, they loaded us up with pickles, green beans, carrots, purple cauliflower, basil, cucumbers, and two varieties of apples, plus an arrangement of flowers.

As soon as we got home, I went out and mowed some grass. Suddenly, that feels like much less of an accomplishment to me than it did the day before.

If it ever seems like we get a lot done around here in terms of upkeep, just know that it’s a drop in a bucket compared to what plenty of others around us out here in the country are doing.

The best takeaway for me from the revelations we saw yesterday is that I am not alone in tending to a little piece of this planet by nurturing nature. We are both helping desirable trees and plants succeed and controlling the spread of troublesome invasives.

It is great to have found such a close neighbor with a similar mindset. It will be good for me to keep in mind that it’s not a competition.

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