Looking for Beauty

Tammy and I have had the good fortune to have been able to travel to some beautiful places during our lives together and we have been able to do so with a nice digital camera in tow for many of those trips.  We love to try our hands at capturing what we see with the full knowledge that some of these places make it impossible to take a truly 'bad' photograph.  And, of course, with a digital camera, you can try a WHOLE 'buncha' times and it doesn't cost you anything more than your personal effort focusing and taking the picture.

When we take pictures at the farm, we often focus on flowers because, just like some of the gorgeous places we have visited, flowers dress up real nice.  If it isn't flowers, then we are taking pictures to record what is going on at the farm.  Only occasionally do we specifically look for a shot that stands out for its 'beauty.'  And yet, if we look for it, we can find beauty in all sorts of farm pictures.

Stealing a Look at Nature at Work
Sometimes, we take a picture to document one thing and we get another.  The photo below was an effort to just record what the flowers on the Swamp Milkweed looked like on this, their first full-year at the farm. 

 We just happened to capture a honey bee flying just to the left of the flower.  Once we saw that, we took a few more photos of the bee crawling around on the flowers.  While this picture will NOT win any awards (not even from me) it respresents a beauty I look for daily during the growing months.  The beauty of pollinators going about their labors collecting food from plants and, in turn, pollinating those plants.  There is a simple beauty to nature's method of successfully matching needs so that each participant comes away the better for that meeting.

A Beautiful Crop Just Before Harvest
Good friend and fellow grower, Mark Quee, said what I was thinking one day when he mentioned how beautiful a crop can look in the days just prior to harvest. 

Typically, the plants have filled out and are at their healthiest before first harvest.  Usually, the weeds are under some level of control and the color, shape and size of the plants rarely improve much beyond that point.  This is especially true for single harvest crops like lettuce.   Once the harvest begins, you can never go back to the beauty that once was.  Even if you do not pick every head from a row, there are now open spots with a stump in its place.  Usually there are a few stray leaves that were rejected that are left next to the row, wilting in the sun.  At the very least, the gaps break the harmony that had once been a solid row of lettuce.

Looking at the Common in a New Way
It's just a handle for the sliding door on the granary.  That's all it is.  The door is losing paint.  The handle isn't particularly attractive.  But, it has a bit of frost on it in this picture (no... it is not a recent picture).

 When you work around something every day, it is very easy to ignore details.  It's even easier to miss the simple beauty of an item that you use every single day.  This handle does not represent complex technology as we might know it, but it is impressive nonetheless.  Combined with the track and rollers at the top of the door, I can open a 12 foot tall by 6 foot wide door with one hand.

Beauty in Little Things
It is one thing to see the beauty in a mountain or a canyon or the ocean.  It's another to slow down and look at a single cluster of crocus.

 Crocus have the advantage of being one of the only things trying to bloom while there is still some snow on the ground.  So, of course, humans are more likely to notice them for that.  But, they are also sometimes inclined to start bloom while being partially covered by leaf litter or other debris from the Fall.  Yet, they still put on their best clothes and give us a smile in April or May at our farm.  Every year we tell ourselves we should put LOTS more of them in the ground in the Fall.  Every Fall comes and we don't get to it.  Maybe this year?

Representational Beauty
I like to occasionally use a bigger word to impress myself with my own vocabu... vocabu...   what is that word again?

 We do not take frequent pictures of the farm's chalk door.  We just keep reusing the same ones whenever we want them for a blog or some such thing.  So, that's why this has a May 30 date on it.  The beauty here is in what all of the crossed off words represent!  To the Genuine Faux Farm, crossed off words represent progress.  And... progress can be beautiful.

The Beauty of Progress
When things get done at the farm, we can have pictures like the one below:

An early New Year's Resolution for 2019?  We're going to take more pictures just after completing farm tasks.  We tend to just go out and do a picture taking spree every so often and other pictures are meant to document for research or other projects.  But, I think Tammy and I get some benefit in seeing pictures like the one above. 

Yes, there are some flowers.  The plants look healthy.  The beds are weeded.  There is diversity.  The beauty of hard work showing progress towards the goal of tasty food.  That's a pretty good picture.