Whether your homestead is one acre or one hundred acres, there’s a
terrific feeling of ownership and stewardship that goes along with knowing
that YOUR land goes from "here to there". You know every tree, every bush,
and every ripple in the landscape.
Paramount to being a good
homesteader is economy: economy of money, of resources and most of all,
of your land. A lot of time and planning go into utilizing every inch to
the best purpose. Especially with small acreages, it’s tempting to
"domesticate" it all - from the vegetable garden to the woodlot to the
pastures, the perfect homestead looks like one big AgExtension Calendar
Cover, right?
Wrong.
Leaving patches of wild growth
is good for the homestead and the homesteaders who dwell there.
First of all, it looks good. There is something very appealing about a patch of overgrowth pasture or
untended woodland- like a living canvas; an ever-changing landscape of
nodding blossoms, graceful grasses and twining viney things gently
punctuates your homestead, softening an otherwise too-orderly-for-nature
scenery and reminding us that we chose this life to escape from or as a
protest to a sadly sterile suburbia.
Second of all, even a tiny
wilderness provides an area just screaming to be explored by young Lewis-and-Clarks armed with plastic compasses, butterfly nets and warm oatmeal
cookies nestled in their linty little pockets. If your place looks like
a manicured subdivision yard, where is the benefit to your barefooted,
country-raised youngens?
I mean, REALLY, if ya’ll are
going to tame the whole mess, you may as well have stayed tucked safely
into "Quail Hills" (where they killed all the nasty, pooping, feather-shedding quails and flattened the hills to make way for row upon row of
identical structures loosely referred to as homes).
Third of all, it’s less work,
and less work is good. Oh sure, you could spend an entire weekend
whaling the tar out of your fencerows, but if you just left them as a
"natural wildflower buffer" think of all the OTHER things you could be
doing with that time. You could build a greenhouse, learn to make
cheese, teach your kids the difference between a moth and a butterfly by
actually LOOKING at real wild moths and butterflies, hang a hammock and
crawl into it with a good book, a glass of tea, maybe a cat, but
absolutely no watch or clock in sight. Heck, you could even study
a foreign language (maybe Canadian).
Lastly of all, be aware of
the fact that your land is not only yours. This is not a commentary on
the government or taxes or the government taxes, but a call to LOOK
AROUND you at who you are displacing with every tree cut and every foot
of garden tilled.
Humans may be at the top of the food chain (something
we like to say, even though there are plenty of life forms quicker,
stronger and possessing of larger, sharper teeth than we have) but if we
push out all the other links there won’t BE a food chain, just us and
those things that are quicker, stronger and with larger, sharper teeth. Now I’m not a degree-holding scientist or a professional odds-maker, but
I do know where I’d put my money in a one-on-one contest of that nature.
Oh, I am aware that the large
predators are endangered already by the domestication of the wilderness,
and that if we insist on progressing with 'progress" the only links in
the food chain will be us, cockroaches, mice and bacteria, (and the "us"
link will be extremely fragile at that point) but the image of a passel
of Starbuck’s-toting, urban-dwelling executives from say, Monsanto,
rounding a corner and encountering a large cat is somehow perversely
comforting.
We need to keep in mind that
this land we claim to "own" will be ours for but a nanosecond in time.
We currently "own" several acres
and have been here for 10 years. There’s a big, dead, half-fallen
pine in the back yard that has no bark on it, but at least 8 round holes
that have been pecked or chewed around the top. Woodpeckers,
squirrels, and at least one family of hoot-owls have made that tree
their home off and on over the years.
There’s a half-acre spring-fed
pond down in the woods that has been home to beavers, fish, and lately a
pair of blue herons who come silently sailing low across the front of
the pines and veer gracefully behind them in and into the pond.
The neighbor had a nice pond too, until he decided to shoot the beavers
who were tending the dam.
On a much smaller, but no less
important scale, for the first four years we lived here each spring
brought a Luna moth to our kitchen window every night for a week or so.
This was enchanting and amazing to me and I looked forward to when "my"
moth would return.
In researching theses creatures,
I learned that they only live a short time after emerging from their
cocoons. So short a time that in their moth stage they don’t even
possess mouth parts (a bad sign for a long life). This made me sad for
the individual moths, but no less enchanted and awed by their visits.
Something had implanted my kitchen window as a stop in their genetic
memories, and that was humbling.
When they stopped coming, I was
extremely saddened. Obviously there had been a change somewhere in
the environment. My kitchen window was no longer a convenient stop
in their short lives and I hope fervently that the change was not
something that I did in the name of making my farm "better", since we’ve
lost more than a big bug sitting on the window, we’ve lost some magic
that was woven into the story of our farm.
I recall reading that The
Perfect Lawn is a sterile environment. Those envied vistas of
green, uniform in color and length, carefully maintained and diligently
doused with Weed-N-Feed and insecticides, are as dead as the surface of
the moon. Between the miles and miles of concrete we’ve laid and
the poisons we’ve poured into the scraped parched soil to manipulate it
into a false beauty, much of our earth is as appealing as a garishly
painted mannequin.
After spending too much time in
urban and suburban America, I return to the tiny speck of land that I
call home, reeling from the stress that forced naturalness brings.
My blood pressure drops with each truly natural sight - the wild
daylilies under the chinaberry bush, wrens nesting outside the bedroom
window in the overgrown untrimmed hedge, even the momentary glimpse of a
coyote at the edge of the woods.
This is my home, but it’s mine
for a short time only. It is my pleasure and honor to use it
gently for my needs, and preserve and protect it for the needs of all
it’s other occupants.
