Be prepared.

That's the slogan of Boy Scouts and folks headed out on summer vacation travel expeditions. Expect no emergencies but plan ahead for the inevitable surprises, good and bad.

Being prepared, or planning, is one of those endeavors that helps make whatever life throws at us more manageable. No, you can't plan for everything, but we can all take steps to try to smooth out life's bumps, anything from bad weather to financial downturns to health issues. No one plans better than Mother Nature. (Or, as a good friend says, "You mean God.") Nature has an astounding order to it, a balance and rhythm that triumphs over natural disasters and cataclysmic events, sometimes enhanced perhaps by the general messing around of mankind in worldly order.

It was a cattail that set me to thinking about nature's inevitable and miraculous preparedness. Walking Lilly one evening last week on our daily dusk tour of the meadow and ponds, suddenly I spied a cattail right in front of my eyes. Skinny and brown, this first "blossom" of the cattail foliage that dots many of the ponds' banks was somewhat unexpected.

"It can't be time for cattails already," was my disbelieving reaction. Cattail heads are for fall.

Guess what? After taking a good look around, I was reminded that most everything we do all spring and summer is about preparedness. And Mother Nature is inevitably out front in that headlong race toward completion of the cycle of life.

Those cattail spikes contain

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the reproductive seeds of the plant, tiny bits of potential new life attached to fluff that floats them on the slightest breeze to new locations to start new colonies of their own kind. We never planted cattails at the ponds, they just showed up, like numerous other things that have rooted and grown around the once-bare pond banks. Volunteer willows have swelled in various corners, along with sprawling elderberry bushes, milkweeds, thistles, and an amazing number of young black walnut trees along our tiny stream, apparently "planted" by the local squirrels.

In the process of their relentless preparedness to proliferate life, the cattails provide homes to an array of frogs, tadpoles, dragonflies, shade for the spawning bluegills, nesting spots for redwing blackbirds and handy cover for a giant snapping turtle partially submerged in the pond waters' edge.

Rows of corn now in pollination all around the farm are preparing for winter, getting ready to form kernels that will pollinate and begin maturing toward providing a next generation. Except that we will intervene with some, chopping it for corn silage before the kernels grow totally hard, in our own preparedness for feeding cows through next winter.

Despite not having planted a single sunflower seed, clumps of tall, blossom-topped stalks dot our flower borders and a few singles hang their heavy yellow heads over the veggie garden. All were the results of self-seeding and drops by our birdfeeder visitors that often stuff their cheeks with the seeds and fly off. As the golden blooms fade, their centers turn dark with fat seeds. Goldfinches preparing for flights to more gentle winter climates will gorge themselves from the border buffet, dining from the seed heads for minutes at a time.

At the sunflowers' feet, pudgy bumblebees duel over the spiky flowers of red and blue salvias. Along with bright zinnias, a fluffy butterfly bush and other colorful neighbors we cultivate for their beauty and fragrances, the salvias entice the pollinators to come and fuel their journey, preparation for the bees as well as a future for other generations of pretty annuals.

We humans can poke in the soil and plant. We can weed and we can feed. We can select the best varieties for productivity, for color, for nutritive value and cultivate them carefully. We can prepare. But, in the end, it is Mother Nature who still always has the final say.

Lucky for all of us species, she is an extremely benevolent, productive and prepared mother.


Joyce Bupp is a Seven Valleys farmer. Her column appears Sundays.