There’s a fox visiting our farm.
At first, it felt like a breach—an uninvited guest slipping through the grass, helping itself to a chicken or two. Not ideal, but not exactly scandalous either. If you welcome wildness, you have to accept that it doesn’t just arrive with birdsong and butterflies. Sometimes, it shows up hungry.
What’s funny is, the fox is new. Or maybe we’re new—to a kind of landscape that allows it to feel safe enough to come around.
For years, we’ve done what most farms do: mowed the grass, tidied the edges, tried to meet the expectations of “looking kept.” But this year, we let go. The mower sat idle. The grass grew tall. And suddenly, the place started blooming in ways we didn’t predict.
The sunflowers are my favorite part.
I scattered seed with intention early in the season—nothing. Fed sunflower seeds to the chickens—now I’m finding plants everywhere. In the middle of the yard and in clumps out in the pasture. The birds did the planting for me. Turns out, they know where to spread beauty better than I do.
Same with the sorghum.
I didn’t plant a single stalk this year. The birds did. Dropped a few kernels here and there, and now we’ve got volunteer sorghum cropping up in the most unexpected places. It’s haphazard, slightly chaotic, and absolutely delightful.
We wouldn’t have any of it if we were still mowing like we used to.
People mean well when they talk about keeping a farm “tidy.” But order isn’t the same as health. Manicured isn’t the same as vibrant. The same way a pristine lawn can be biologically sterile, a tightly controlled life can be void of growth.
Sometimes you have to let things get a little messy.
Sure, we lose a chicken every now and then. But we gain biodiversity. We get foxes and fireflies, thistle and goldfinches, and plants we didn’t put in the ground ourselves. We trade control for complexity, and it’s not always easy—but it’s worth it.
The land teaches us that not everything beautiful comes through planning. Some things arrive through invitation. Through leaving space. Through trusting the creatures, the seeds, and the processes that operate beyond our spreadsheets and schedules.
Wildness doesn’t apologize.
It blooms and bites, regenerates and reclaims. And if we’re brave enough to welcome it, we find ourselves living inside a system that doesn’t need us to manage every detail—just to steward it well.
So yes, I still grumble when a hen disappears. And yes, the thistle still stings.
But the sunflowers and the fox remind me what we get when we let nature lead.
And frankly, I think it’s a fair trade.
