Walking The Pasture

Grant and Blair came to visit today, having flown in from Tucson last night. After lunch Grant organized a walk down to the creek to visit our big sycamore. My hip is not up to climbing up and down hills today, so I headed in the opposite direction, to the pasture.

First I visited our old garden area, fenced off from the rest of the pasture. The garden occupied nearly a quarter acre and it produced enough vegetables to feed us, to can and freeze and to sell at Farmers' Market. We haven’t had a garden here since rheumatoid arthritis struck me 26 years ago. Now the garden has returned to pasture and the garden gate hangs ajar, in need of repair.

The old oddball apple tree that grows along the garden fence drew me closer. It grew from the rootstock of a grafted Victory apple that died. The rootstock put up its own kind of apple tree. It blooms profusely every year and unfailingly produces a large crop of golden apples. The apples are smaller than golf balls and totally inedible.

I hadn’t been in the pasture for months and I was curious to see the summer drought’s effects on the native plants that grow there. Grasses are plentiful and are seemingly unaffected except not as tall. The broom sedge seems normal, too, but bloom stalks of wildflowers are sparse, where normally they would be plentiful.

One crop, totally unintended, is thriving – volunteer Austrian pine trees. The pines we planted thirty-five years ago now have enough offspring to start a Christmas tree farm. I counted more than forty of them. We need volunteers to step up and cut some of them this year to decorate their homes.

Passing through the windbreak on my way back to the house I was struck by the plentiful cedar berries. All the female trees bore a heavy crop this year. The male trees, of course, finished their job of spreading pollen months ago and have been lolling about ever since.

I’ll be watching this winter for flocks of cedar waxwings to harvest the berries. A flock of those birds covering a cedar tree is a beautiful sight to behold.

Copyright 2012 by Shirley Domer