This week is dance camp for our two granddaughters. We provide rides for them to go to camp and some days their mother picks them up from camp. Other days, we give them a ride home. The camp is just three hours each day for four days, so it isn’t much extra for us to drop the girls off on our way to work. Yesterday, we left the office a bit early to pick them up and participated in meetings over Zoom later in the day. On Thursday, we will attend their performances, which will be a treat for us. Just being in the dance studio is a bit of nostalgia for me because I have so many fond memories of our daughter’s years of ballet classes, camps and performances.

Next week, the two oldest grandchildren have coding camp, and the following week is our church’s Creation Care Camp, our version of Vacation Bible School. We are scrambling with all kinds of preparations for the camp and looking forward to that week. It will be a fun time and we already have more children registered than total attendance last year.

As we stop by the farmhouse to pick up and return children, the sidewalk up to the house travels between flower beds. There are lots of California poppies, daisies, and lavender in bloom. Yesterday, I paused at the lavender under the dogwood tree and saw that there were three kinds of bees working on the tiny purple flowers. I am always looking for the honey bees whose hives I tend and was happy to see many of them at work collecting nectar and pollinating the plants. But there were also several mason bees among the blossoms. As I watched a larger bumble bee came by and began moving from flower to flower. I was delighted to see all three types of bees.

I worried a bit when I brought honey bees to the farm that they might compete and perhaps even displace some of the other pollinators on the farm. However, there are plenty of blossoms for all fo the bees. The dahlias are just beginning to produce flowers, so there will be a lot of blossoms for the next six weeks or more - just right for making honey. And there seem to be plenty of wild bees that are out among the blossoms, so the honey bees are adding to the farm, not disrupting its balance.

I plan to add more honey supers to the hives in the next week or so. It is exciting to see the bees build out the frames with comb, fill the combs with honey and cap the cells. It appears that this will be a good year for honey harvesting. The mild winters around here mean that the bees need less honey to keep the hives warm and I have a strategy for insulating the hives and the capacity to supplement the bees’ honey if necessary. However, I don’t think I’ll need to feed the bees this winter. Things are looking very good at the hives.

I am struck by the abundance of nature. Our freezer is nearly full and it is only early July. I admit that part of the space in the freezer is taken up by our over-purchasing for our anniversary celebration in June. We still have a couple of gallons of ice cream that were left over from the party. But the freezer has many gallons of cherries. I haven’t kept track of how many we have, but we picked every day for a couple of weeks. One night I picked a bucket of cherries, came inside, washed, sorted, and pitted the cherries. That bucket full yielded nearly eight pounds for the freezer. At the current price of $7.50 per pound of cherries with the pits in them, I was putting at least $60 worth of cherries in the freezer that night. We have several hundred dollars worth of cherries in our freezer - enough to last us a year. All of that produce is from a single cherry tree. We have two cherry trees in our back yard, but only one produces sweet cherries. The other one’s chief role seems to be to offer pollen to keep the cherry production up. It does produce a few small, tart cherries, but the other tree is the one that gives us and the birds such a bounteous harvest.

In some ways, this year is a bit short in plant production. The pasture at the farm yielded several hundred fewer bales this year than last. The spring was cold and warm weather was slow to come resulting in shorter grass in the pasture. The decision has already been made to keep fewer cows this year to offset the lower hay production. But even with the lower production from the hay field, there are other areas of the farm that are yielding bounty to match the cherry production in our back yard. Our grandchildren have harvested and dried bundles of lavender to sell in the farm stand. Fresh bouquets of flowers are also added to the stand regularly. There is abundance even in a year when growing is slow.

We have already harvested the first tomato from the plants in our yard and we can tell that this is going to be a good year for tomatoes. The sense of being surrounded by abundance greets us wherever we turn.

We are aware that we are in a very privileged place on this globe. We read about heat domes and flooding that is threatening agricultural production in many other parts of our country. Huge fires are setting records every day in Canada. There are lots of challenges and problems all around the world that slow or even stop farm output. And, at least for now, we are living in the midst of incredible bounty.

As we express our gratitude for such blessings and say our prayers of thanksgiving, we are reminded that experiencing the bounty is only part of our calling. Such abundance has put us in a position to share. Bags of cherries have already found their way to others’ homes. Bunches of lavender also are being distributed. And the busyness of the bees and the health of the hives has me thinking about honey harvest and having more than we will need. I don’t want to count my chickens before they are hatched, but prospects of a big honey harvest seem good.

And as for chickens - the flock at the farm is up by 10 or more. There will be plenty of eggs in the months to come. There is much to add to our prayers of thanksgiving each day.