Heavy Duty Acres: Harvest 2008
Heavy Duty Acres is a 4-acre property in Liberty, Wisconsin. It is primarily a wooded hillside on a south-facing slope, with the base nestled down in the hollow. When we began making payments on the property in 2001, everything that wasn't woods was mowed. On our first weekend stay (we lived in Milwaukee at the time), we got out the spades and dug out a fire pit. It didn't take long to see the property as a canvas, with the gifts of nature as our palette. Here you can view the documentation of our sculpting of the earth.
September 7, 2008 Let's catch up a with 2008's activity with a little photo-illustration of what transpired between April 30 and July 23.
April 30, 2008
July 23, 2008
Looks like I need to work on some consistency issues here. In the first photo, the raspberry patch is indicated by the B. I used an R in the second photo. As you can see, it got a little messy. We have been told that piling on the wood chips in the early spring would help, so we'll try that next year. This year, it's been tough to find time to clean out the thistle and grass, but we have mad some progress. Berry production is decent, but the birds are getting a lot of them before we get to them, and the deer continue to munch the canes. We're expecting a better year for berries in 2009.
April 30, 2008
June 1, 2008
The photos above illustrate how the prairie planting, P, progresses. In April, there's nothing. It looks like a struggling lawn. By the time June gets here, the early season, non-native grasses are fully grown, already going to seed. UHG-LEE. Prairie people I know suggest a burn earlier in the year to set back these early grasses and destroy their seeds. The prairie seeds that are waiting to come up (they sprout later in summer, around June), can not only withstand the heat of the fire, but the fire scarifies them, and some of the seeds actually require the fire to germinate. Beyond, that, the shade created by the cover of these early grasses reduces the amount of summer sun heat the would-be prairie seedlings require. We never seem to be able to get a burn in, partly because we're too busy, and partly because Heavy Duty Acres is in a hollow that is often cool and damp, and never seems to have enough dry fuel for a fire. We'll try to do it in 2009.
July 23, 2008
Hey! But look happens by late July! This photo is looking the opposite direction, East, but shows the same space rich with Foxglove Penstemon, penstemon digitalis. This plant not only looks great in bloom (the clusters of white), but remains a good-looking plant as it stands tall with seed for the remainder of the year and even into the next spring. We're lucky to have lots of it, and it's only there because we sowed the seeds five years ago. With prairie plants being perrenial, they come back stronger every year and each fall we can gather the seeds to sow in other areas of Heavy Duty Acres; or we can take the seeds home and nurture them in 3-inch pots, creating "plugs" for guaranteed plants. (The O in this picture denotes the orchard space, beyond the prairie to the East, and the G is the garlic bed, beyond the dead and truncated elm.)
Other exciting late July news is the sight of these prairie darlings where once there were none. On the left, milkweed necessary for the proliferation of Monarch butterflies; the result of gathering seedpods from our neighbor's home garden and sowing them in the prairie space at Heavy Duty Acres last fall. On the right, a pale purple coneflower (not its more obnoxious and gaudy cousin from the West coast, popular in gardens across the midwest, but true echinacea pallida), another native Wisconsin prairie plant that is fruit of our labor.
Simple pleasures like the sight of these darlings can warm a cold heart, but it doesn't come overnight. You can't order it online and have it arrive by UPS the next day. But what it testifies is that with patience and a little sweat, we (that's you, me, and everybody else) can help return our ecosystem (or at least part of it) back to the way nature (or God) intended it. We wrecked it. It's our responsibility to fix it. The good news is it feels great to fix it.
If this kind of talk interests you, you might like to read A Call to Farms, a new book recently designed by The Heavy Duty Press and available now at the Heavy Duty Etsy Store.
STRAWBERRY MOON 2008 An intro to Heavy Duty Acres