Doing Penance

What fools we mortals be, especially when city folk move to the country. Even though Dennis and I were farmers’ kids, neither of us had ever actually lived in the country. Both of our farmer fathers lived in towns (very, very little towns) and drove to the country to tend to their farms.

We thought we were country savvy. We knew when wheat is planted and when soybeans are harvested. We knew a little about vegetable gardening, but mostly about garden produce. Both of us had roamed the countryside as kids, playing in the hayloft, fishing in the pond, feeding the hogs dried corn on the cob, gathering walnuts and gooseberries.

We weren’t as smart as we thought we were. One of the first things I did was cut the thick stem of a bittersweet vine that had climbed to a treetop. I wanted the berries to be accessible for cutting and I assumed that if I cut the vine trunk it would put up new growth from its roots. Wrong. With one swift lop I had killed it.

In those early days, humbled, I sought wisdom from the Agriculture Extension Service, which has a presence in every county in this country. Our Extension has a whole roomful of bulletins on every imaginable aspect of farming, gardening, living in the country, bee-keeping, and more, all free for the taking. I loaded up and studied them carefully.

One bulletin was about establishing a windbreak. I wanted one at the north end of our pasture. Through the Douglas County Extension Service I acquired an inexpensive bundle of 25 Austrian pine seedlings for creating a windbreak. Dennis and I planted most of the 12-inch seedlings all along the north road and plugged the extras into our front yard. Country folk all around were doing the same. One couple planted 100 pines. The trees showed up in town, too, in nurseries and lawns.

The trees grew tall over 37 years and even reproduced. But about ten years ago, Austrian pines began dying all over the county. The Lawrence Journal World explained this phenomenon: “Tip blight, pine wilt and dothistroma needle blight are especially problematic in the Midwest because of temperature and moisture fluctuations.” The news story also pointed out that Austrian pines are non-native and are ill suited to our climate. Our trees also were dying from a borer that penetrated the trunk and literally sapped the tree. We paid handsomely to have several dead ones cut down, but many remained and have been dying one by one.

Yesterday we paid penance for our foolishness. A nice man brought a big machine and jerked all the remaining pines up by their roots. He piled the pasture pines in a great heap and will come back to burn them after they have dried, preferably when there’s snow on the ground.

Here’s the heap with Indian grass and big bluestem in the foreground.

Here’s where they came from.

I have a plan for the pine’s offspring, too. Pam, my right-hand woman, will harvest them to sell as Christmas trees. Then we will be done with Austrian pines.

About the time we planted the pines, we also paid regular autumn visits to the Black Jack Prairie, a patch of native prairie carved with wagon ruts of the Santa Fe Trail. We gathered seeds of the grasses and forbs and scattered them in our pasture, which had been planted with brome grass. We hoped to restore the five-acre pasture to a native prairie. Nearly forty years later, this prairie recreation has increased exponentially. Indian grass and big bluestem abound, some over seven feet tall, along with Kansas gayfeather, rattlesnake master, blue sage, white indigo, black-eyed susan, and eleven kinds of milkweed.

Indian Grass Seed Head

All these plants are loaded with seeds. Here are two gayfeather blooms gone to seed.

Gayfeather Seed Heads

This morning Dennis walked into our prairie and collected two pounds of seeds to scatter over the disrupted pasture area. There are lots more where these came from.

Whew, what a price to pay for misplaced trust and our own ignoranceI We’re doing penance for that.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer