Letter from Birdland--Harvest

It has warmed up some in Birdland, and dried out enough for the harvest to begin. The corn is the color of my dog, Isis, but it's the beans they're cutting now, all day and into the evening, the headlights of the combine crawling slowly across the field. It's always dramatic to come home to bean stubble, the field half shaved, the grain truck waiting patiently by the road for the next load. The corn still surrounds the house and yard, offering a privacy fence that's mostly psychological.

In autumn the colors of Birdland are mostly on the earthy side of the spectrum, but still a whole rainbow of shades from gray to soft yellow to a deep brown. The Hackberry leaves turn greenish yellow on the tree, but are a papery, and warty gray when they fall. Most of the flowers have dried and turned brown or gone to seed in a cloud of fluff. We still have the occasional thistle and aster to feed any lingering bees. The lack of springtime colors makes the thistles' purple even more dramatic. Weeks ago the locust trees dropped their tiny gold leaflets, like long, thin, golden coins scattered in the grass. Now their thorny branches stubbornly hold on to a few gnarled beans, giving the barnyard a spooky appearance.

The chicken coop has new tenants, but they are not feathered. A rat family has taken up residence, tunneling into the chicken yard. It’s probably not much of a threat right now, except for eating the chicken food, but in the spring when Miss Tawny hatches some eggs, it could be a danger to her chicks. The coop, which was built as a “chicken tractor,” a small, portable hutch with an attached yard, which could be conveniently moved around the garden to provide pest control and cultivation services, became somewhat more permanent when we decided to let the chickens range free. But now I’m thinking we might move it, coop, yard, feed, chickens and all, and leave the rats to their burrow, at least for the winter.

Last week I finally had sun on one of my working at home days, and began transplanting the day lilies and some bulbs along the curved path to the barn that I mowed in the long grass. After the chilly, damp weather, the sun felt like springtime, and I had fun imagining the bulbs growing into little bursts of color next year. The path seemed shorter from the seat of the mower. Digging a hole every few feet on each side seemed to lengthen it, and I’m only about two-thirds done. Still, that didn’t stop my mind from rushing ahead, planning rows and rows of Iris and Day Lilies of every variety, spreading color all over the yard. I told you that flower farm was inspiring.

My mind skips from inspiration to inspiration, like a bee in a garden, settling on first one flower, then another. I hear a rumor about a woman who turned her farm into an organic, diversified garden, one acre at a time. Could I tackle the yard in a similar way? Yesterday I heard on All Things Considered, a story about a man in Kansas who wants to develop perennial food crops by crossing Wheat with the native grasses of the Prairie. Wes Jackson says that perennial plants dig deep into the earth and actually improve the soil year after year, while annual crops leach out the nutrients, and allow erosion. He thinks our agricultural system should be more a part of nature. I think about my friend’s daughter, who does research on Miscanthus grass. She told me that it is a perennial grass used as a biofuel, and it’s very labor intensive to plant the rhizomes the first time, but you need to do that only once, instead of annually. An article published last year in ScienceDaily says that research at the University of Illinois has found that Miscanthus can grow well in poor soil, and is more efficient than other biofuel crops. Speaking of perennials, I’ve noticed that a volunteer patch of asparagus over by where we want to dig a farm pond has become quite bushy and green in the past few years. I think I’ll keep an eye on it and see if I can get it to spread. It’s in the tall grass, and I can never find it again when the shoots begin to show until it’s too late to harvest. This year when it toasts to golden brown, I’ll cut it down and cover the surrounding area with mulch to help me find it in the spring.

Dig in Beauty; Dream in Peace; Blessed Be.

Mary Lucille Hays lives in Birdland, near White Heath. She is interested in issues of social justice and sustainability. Birdland now has a fan page on facebook. Mary can be reached by snail mail care of this newspaper, or by email at LetterFromBirdland@gmail.com.