Category: Our Prairie Habitat

Our surroundings, our habitat if you will, has an enormous effect on our lives, so that seems a good place to look for values that will sustain us and our children to the seventh generation.

Hurting for Home

I’ve been reading about regenerative agriculture and it makes me hurt for home.

For several generations now, farms have become more and more industrial, more and more unsustainable, bigger and bigger. Look at monocultures and the millions of gallons of chemicals that make them possible, and I remember the farm where I grew up. 

The knowledge necessary to farm regeneratively has been disappearing, but I know how to do it. I was there helping my family with a diversified farming operation back when that was still possible. Mostly the genetically-modified seeds and agro-chemicals weren’t even available then, so we used alternatives.

We rotated crops like alfalfa that fix nitrogen with cash crops like wheat that require it. We were a small family on a small farm, but we mostly kept ahead of weeds by chopping them with machetes—early in the mornings when it was cool.  Pests and fungi had less chance of getting a foothold in the before-mentioned rotating fields. In spring, we scooped out the chicken coop, the barn, and corrals so we could spread the animal droppings on the fields with our honey wagon (manure spreader).

We didn’t need much cash because we grew most of our own food—cattle on the rough lands, pigs, chickens, eggs, milk, butter. We had gardens and orchards. We canned and froze a lot of food. We had farm ponds and game preserves where we fished and hunted, and invited the townsfolk to join us.

Sound like a lot of work? Maybe, it was but we did it together—when it rained and we couldn’t get to the fields, we went fishing. It wasn’t always idyllic. Sometimes it was really hard, like when a storm wiped out an entire year’s crop. But when the wheat got hailed, there was still corn and cattle and pigs. Farm economics demanded we get bigger—and bigger—or die and that broke my father’s heart. Literally. I’ll never forget all the farm equipment lined up in the yard for the farm sale.

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Awareness

I recently ran across John Steinbeck’s The Log From the Sea of Cortez. An article in the September issue of Smithsonian pointed me in the right direction and I’m glad it did.

Steinbeck marvels in the early part of the book on the boat master’s ability to stay on course and writes at length about the organic nature of steering on water. I’ve never spent much time on a boat, but I used to fly and I think I understand something of the adaptation we humans must make in alien environments. I believe it has to do with attention.

One of the tests a pilot must pass in order to received a license requires recovering from a stall. Basically you make your craft start falling out of the sky and then you recover from that fall—preferably before you hit the ground.

I couldn’t do it. I could recover all right. I just couldn’t make the plane stall. I’d pull the nose up until the plane was nearly vertical, but the instant I heard the change in engine pitch and felt that soft kind of flutter that signaled a stall, I dropped the nose and the stall never happened. Over and over, the examiner instructed me to stall the plane, but I couldn’t. So he stalled it for me. I recovered and got my license.

Some people would call that flying by the seat of my pants, but it wasn’t. It was responding to subtle but concrete sensory cues. What I’m getting at is that my awareness of the tiniest sounds and sensations made me safe in the sky. Like steering a boat or flying a plane, we humans can learn a great deal from attention to the sights and sounds, the smell and even the feel of the air around us.

Our planet is under siege and we with it. We need to experience and understand the nuances of what’s around us. We know about the conflagration in the Amazon and the floods in low-lying areas all over the world, but we need to know about our own neighborhoods. Our very lives depend upon it.

Forget about roses. have you ever stopped, listening to bumblebees working on butterfly milkweed?

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What About Energy?

I’ve been thinking about energy. The thing that brings it to the top of my mind is my heart—actually the neurons that control my heartbeat.

I currently have a heart monitor imbedded in my chest. Before it was implanted, the medical staff told me it’s just this tiny little thing. They showed me the little metal device. “We’ll just slip it under your skin . . .” Hardly prepped me for the sledgehammer to the chest of the needle delivering anesthetic.

So here’s what I’ve been thinking about: While this was tiny as surgery goes, it hurt. If the monitor shows that I need a pacemaker (another tiny little device, they tell me, that required a tiny little surgery) there’s the problem of battery replacement after THAT surgery—and removal of the monitor.

I’ve been reading about static electricity. Twice in the last few months, I’ve read that scientists think they can develop pacemakers that recharge using the static electricity created by the patient’s lungs—just by breathing. That’s what I want, but it’s not yet on the market.

Industrial-scale devices to power whole cities with static energy aren’t either, though I read in the current issue of Discover Magazine that several groups of scientists are working on them. I hope they’re successful.

In the meantime, my health and the world economy depend on research, economics, and a whole range of other forces beyond my control. I’m daunted by the task of making those processes more sustainable.

When I’m overwhelmed, I often turn to other’s wise words. Wendell Berry is one of those wise speakers. He’s not speaking specifically of energy when he says: “The dilemma of private economic responsibility . . . is that we have allowed our suppliers to enlarge our economic boundaries so far that we cannot be responsible for our effects on the world. The only remedy for this that I see is to draw in our economic boundaries. shorten our supply lines, so as to permit us to know literally where we are economically.”And yet, everything we buy, everything we use, exists within those far-flung economic systems—thereby enlarging my dilemma.

Not only am I ignorant of the static-charged battery’s stage of development, I don’t know where and how the actual pacemakers are made. What resources go into their manufacture? What other materials and equipment go into their implantation? Are all those things sustainable? Are there more sustainable alternatives?

I’ve seen unsustainable medical devices that are just plain silly. When it comes to my health, can I identify those devices and procedures and avoid them?

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Mama Was a Rock Star

This post comes from a Carrot Ranch Literary Community 99-word challenge. The challenge word/phrase this time was “rock star.“ You should try it.

She starred with big band orchestras in cities along the Eastern Seaboard and around the Great Lakes. Then she married a Nebraska farmer. He moved her to a stark little square house with a hip roof in the middle of a howling wilderness. In less than three years, she ran back to city lights—nightclubs—singing all night. .

But she came back. She adapted to the prairie’s silences and its screaming winds, the outhouse, the washboard, and the tyranny of crops and livestock. She became a better farm wife than many women who grew up on farms—she rocked.

Snow-covered farmstead with little relief from stark white.
This is a few years later (about 1950) and some of Daddy’s trees had started to grow. The volunteer mulberry tree (bottom right) still stands.
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Grandma’s Comet

Grandma Hazel was 100 years old when Hale-Bopp streaked across the silent night sky at thousands of miles per second. For 4,000 years it had burned its way through the Milky Way, out of our sight.

When I realized I could see it through the back door, I asked Grandma to come look. She complied, more to please me, I suspect, than to see one more sight in a lifetime of looking. I pointed and described its position, but she hadn’t the gumption to lift her eyes. Maybe she was already out there, flying among the fire and ice.

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Squirrel Yoga

From the rocking chair where I give my grandson his bottles, I look out my front door—all glass. Several times now I’ve noticed a red squirrel clinging head down to the trunk of the gigantic elm that shades my house. For all you yoga enthusiasts, I can describe the squirrel’s posture as cobra pose.

Cobra is difficult enough flat on the floor—lying on your tummy, hands under your shoulders, pushing your chest up and arching your neck backward. And then HOLD. The squirrel seems able to hold indefinitely. Since I’m always feeding the baby when I see him, I’ve been unable to jump up and snap a photo, but I have hope.

I’ve noticed another squirrel streaking up and down the tree. I recognize that one by its blond tail. I noticed it first before Mother’s Day and thought the other squirrels would bully it. I’d seen that happen on East Campus in Lincoln several years earlier. There the squirrel was black. Here, I thought I saw some nastiness at first, but the blond squirrel seems to have found acceptance.

Bruce is just beginning to focus on stark contrasts and movement, but I can hardly wait to start showing him squirrels. I remember how much fun I had showing my sons wildlife—until they became better spotters than me.

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I Just Can’t Hep Myself

I can’t seem to help myself. Maybe this happens to you. You go outside in the morning to water some special plants. You’ll only be out there for 10 minutes, 15 at the maximum. Then, two hours later, you get back in the house—sunburned maybe—but you’ve probably done it so many times your skin has already turned dark. Sunscreen? You’re only going to be outside 10 minutes and the sun hasn’t even cleared the neighbor’s treetops.

If that sounds at all familiar, you can probably picture my morning. Among the things I’m passionate about is prairie. I live in town now, not altogether willingly, but I grew up on a farm in mid-grass prairie.  So I’ve been gradually turning my large lot back into short-grass species.  I love that I don’t have to water except maybe once or twice a season—and mow not at all. That means I can allow wildflowers to grow . . .

See. That’s how I end up outside for hours rather than minutes. I distract myself.

Prairie Coneflower

Back to this morning, it proceeded like many others. I watered the new grass I planted last month. Buffalo and gramma grasses are doing well. Then I popped around to the other side of the shed to pick raspberries. There were some woody canes from last year’s crop growing in the “patch,” so I stepped inside the shed for my pruners and leather gloves to cut a few of them. Well, I kept cutting. When I’d finally cut all the canes and picked all the raspberries, I noticed I had some snow peas ready to pick. So I picked them.

That took me through the shed to the vegetable garden where I noticed I had some suckers growing on my pumpkin vines. I still had the pruners with me, so I cut them. And then, of course, I had to check the tomatoes. I have a calcium deficiency in my soil here and I remembered I hadn’t given the ‘maties their calcium nitrate, so I went back in the shed and got the calcium to spread. That reminded me I needed to spread some micro-nutrients to all the food plants. I went back in the shed and got the pellets to scatter.

I have a piece of roof gutter in the garden. It has holes drilled in it and end caps. Since I have an artesian well in the middle of my basement, I pump water for months. I’ve routed it to the garden where I run it into the gutter to control the flow onto my veggies. Well, I had to move the apparatus to a new location. Then the morning was pretty well gone.

Does this ever happen to you? Do you have a distraction story?

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