As a writer, I spend half of my week thinking about how I can write about what goes on around me. Sometimes I think of the perfect title and walk through my opening paragraph in my head while I’m still cutting meat or working on the tractor. Ironically, I then sit down at my computer in the final minutes of my week and struggle to recall all of the stories I’ve already written in my head. Alas poor reader, the tales I will have only yarned in the fictitious void of my mind that you will never have enjoyed.

However, truth be told, you are spared from a lot of the strange and irrelevant tangents held in that unwritten prison. I normally have so much going on around the farm that I have my pick of big and exciting things to share, but I find my greatest joys are in the moments between.

Small discoveries on the farm are frequent and unending if only you keep working and looking. One such moment came this past week as I was inspecting our garlic crop. I was weeding around the sides of the bed and picking scapes, which are now nearly done, when I saw something that caught my eye. Poking up through the middle of the garlic beds were several long tendrils of grass. My initial instinct was to pull them out for the weeds I assumed them to be. As I reached for the first one, however, I noticed the tops with their heavily laden nodes and hairs. I reached up and snapped off the head of one and took it back to the shop for confirmation of my crazy theory.

What I thought I had discovered was a grain head of a popular grain, as opposed to some wild one. It was well developed, still green, and had the distinct shape of a wheat or barley head. I showed it to my father-in-law, who agreed it was suspiciously similar to those. We both agreed that it did not look like the winter rye that he had planted around other fields nearby, due to the lack of a bluish hue.

It had been growing directly in the middle of my garlic bed, which had been mulched with a bright golden straw, well dried, bought from Agway the previous fall. What my father-in-law told me was that sometimes the grain seeds are still viable in fresh straw, and what I had was likely a germination from the straw I used to keep other weeds from growing in that bed. He further said that since it was a bright yellow straw as opposed to a dirty colored straw, it was likely a barley straw as opposed to a wheat straw.

With this information in hand, I felt pretty confident in the deduction that it was, in fact, barley. For good measure, I image searched it on Google and was told that it was either wheat or barley. I’ll give credit to the farmer over AI in this instance and roll with our educated guess.

Now that I more or less knew what it was, I decided that I would not weed it out, but rather wait until after the garlic had been pulled and the grain had dried down. Then I would gather what I could and attempt to plant it this fall as a test of grain growing in another corner of our field. I’ve never grown grains before, and since this was a happy surprise, I may as well make the most of it.

The way out here, blessings come as small and as subtle as a blade of grass in many acres of fields. If you are tuned to the voice of our creator, it becomes a simple thing to see these as plainly as something more obvious, like the purchase of a new tractor or a bountiful harvest.

Blessings like these often come in stages. A seed today, a small crop tomorrow, and by next year this time, perhaps a loaf of bread: small things, all working together to build meaning. It’s not unlike road signs. It’s easy to see the billboards posted specifically for your attention, but if not for the little hand-painted sign covered in ivy, one might never find the small treasures that receive a little less attention.