Dirt Work

The Cranky Girls have returned to their Not Farm space to prepare for Kindergarten and Middle School. Meta Cranky is preparing to have someone else take her trash away each Friday. But on our way out of town, CGs managed to collect several adventures and a photo backlog that we will process urban tranquility. 

Here's what we saw on our last day at the farm:

What we didn't see was the road, our mailbox, and our house. Our vision was obstructed by our neighbor's farm, which was vigorously blowing north. Here's what it looked like from our house, moving in from the south:

Turns out that what you really want on a hot windy day is a luscious alfalfa field. Not just because your legumes are fixing nitrogen in your soil. No, it's because those 15-foot roots are holding your dirt down. 

This has been a sorry summer for farmers. After the harvest, we got a drought and weeks of merciless heat. Last summer, we could plant field peas after harvest, a fine way to get a summer crop while scoring more of those nitrogen-fixing legumes. But without a rain, field peas were pretty much out of the picture. So we waited, and waited, to prep the field for a fall crop. Our field has been plowed once, with great trouble and expense, and more broken plow shears than we care to count.  

Look closely and you'll see the light brown wheat stubble in our lumpy field. Turns out that lumpy and stubbly is terrific on a day like this.  The dust you see wafting above our field isn't ours: our lumpy field stayed put while south wind picked up the smooth, twice-cultivated field nearby.

Make all the Dust Bowl comparisons you like, but a perfect storm of high wind and dry conditions can make any farmer look like an idiot. On our farm, we clearly remember when our sandy hill began to blow in the '60s. The Cranky Family unrolled bale after bale of hay on the sandy spots to keep the dirt where it belonged. Now we've planted the hill (which is classified as "Highly Erodible Land" by Feds That Give Us Money) into permanent grasses, so we won't have to go there again. 

Erosion on a this scale is tragic, of course. But can we take a moment to say that it's also a big pain in the tush? The Crankies' front porch has drifts that would be at home in Lawrence of Arabia. We left open a south basement window: the beds downstairs were covered with a layer of sand that brought to mind the snow drifts of Dr. Zhivago. Those aren't the film references that we're going for. Babe or Chicken Run  we can handle. But you can keep Ralph Fiennes, his swishy khakis, the Libyan desert, and The English Patient. 

--MCG