Feeling Blue

Finally getting a bunch of photos out of the camera and into the blog. When I get a bunch backlogged in there, it's hard to have time to sort through them. Not that I have time now...but sometimes I just have to get out the shoehorn and MAKE time!

This is a sad photo. The subject's name will be read with a different, more solemn inflection that it would have been read a month ago, because now I have seen this one dead, and I know its form in death more intimately than in life, and I know the weight of the thing in my hand.

The indigo bunting is one of the greatest avian joys of the farm, to me. Never before the farm have I definitively seen this gorgeous creature the color of a South American butterfly. They are birds of the woodland margins, the edges where the meadows meet the trees. They frequent the shady spaces...I see them most closely along the west sheep pen lane. They are not given to perching on telephone wires in neatly mowed right-of-ways along highways.

In death, this one proves all the more beautiful for being able to hold it in my hand and turn it this way and that, seeing the light play on its incredible azure plumage. The colors shift from intense sky blue to deep violet-indigo. And the diminuitive size surprises me--it's smaller than a sparrow, about the size of a tame finch. In life, they seem larger.

I am comforted that there are others on the farm...I saw one later that same day. I might worry about why this one died--West Nile Virus? Bird Flu?--but realize that there are many reasons for a small bird to be dead, and that an isolated death is not cause for alarm.

Thank you, little bird, for your beauty in death as well as life.

Snap Decision

I'm weeding along like a maniac in a fallow bed, hastily pulling big morning glory vines out of it so I can plant the last of the leek transplants (special for M., one her favorite veggies), when a clod of dirt starts moving.

This is not really that unusual, even though it's disconcerting every time. After I jump, I'm excited and curious.

Usually it's a big fat toad, well camouflaged by speckles and warts. We love seeing toads (hm...none so far this year, but the weather is still quite cool.) This time it was a baby snapping turtle!

We have not found a snapper on the farm before. Usually they hang out in ponds and streams, going cross-country mainly in the fall as they seek out wintering spots. This one had probably been wandering around in the ubiquitous mud, thinking the whole farm was a wetland, and ended up just outside the chicken coop.

I treat snappers with extreme respect. They are dangerous animals. They can grow very large, and they are very strong, and when they bite they don't let go.

But this little guy wasn't very active...seemed like he had had a hard day for some reason. Maybe he had been IN the coop, and the chickens had tried to have him for breakfast? And he WAS only about 4" long...shell the size of the palm of my hand. So I picked him up gingerly by the tail, and went to show him to M., who happened to be talking to the tree service guys bringing in a load of wood chips.

One of the tree service guys was captivated. I don't think he'd ever seen one before. "I'm a biology major at Haskell (Indian Nations University). Let me take him and I'll release him in the wetlands (on the Wakarusa River, near the Haskell campus...a beautiful place)."

I debated. Normally my policy is that creatures found on the farm stay on the farm...aimed at preventing enthusiatic 5-year-olds from dragging home hapless frogs, etc., to unimaginable, unintentional torture. Also, well...this is their HOME! I don't want to be dragged off to some strange place, either! Microbial compatibility between the critter's destination and its original habitat is also something to consider. Moving across town, to a different wetland, might be the turtle equivalent of going to Mexico and having to drink the water.

But in this case I relented. Though I'm excited to be aware of a wider diversity of reptiles on the farm, snapping turtles are not high on my life of good neighbors and esteemed community members. It's bad enough that garter snakes and herons go fishing in the stock tanks, depleting our populations of essential mosquito-larvae-eating goldfish. But at least they are not likely to seriously bite hapless fingers cleaning muck out of a tank. Sort of in the same class as ticks...part of a diverse ecosystem, and I'm sure God had SOMETHING in mind when He created them, but I'm not "getting" it.

And, I'm sure snappers are like mice...if you see one, you have ten. This guy was hatched this spring, I'm guessing, and probably had quite a few littermates, so I doubt I've decimated the population by contributing this youngster to the young man's education. I'm also pretty sure Haskell wetlands already has LOTS of snappers, so we're not likely to introduce anything new there, unless he had hitchhikers like leeches. He looked pretty clean, though...I've seen big ones with whole water gardens on their backs, including various "pets". Turtles can be significant vectors for spreading other life forms between bodies of water.

His name...as much as I know of the names that scientific humans know him by...will be read in the Reading of Names.

Reading of Names Planned for June 22, 2008

'You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.' - R. Buckminister Fuller

Here is something I am planning to do towards making explicit the 'new model' I have been building--DEVELOPING--at the farm for more than 12 years:

Sunday, June 22--the day after the Solstice--I will go out to the 'tabernacle' in the middle of the pasture at dawn, and at sunrise I will begin to mindfully read aloud the names of all the beings who are part of the Community of Life at the farm. I am inviting others to join me in person for whatever span of time they are able throughout the morning--to take turns reading and/or add names I may have forgotten--or to join me in spirit by praying for this Community of Life sometime during that time.

I have no idea how long the reading will take. It will begin with reading a list of scientific and common names of species that were keyed out by a naturalist friend in 2000--at that time, he definitively identified more than 450 species that had established themselves at Pinwheel Farm without intentional human agency, and we have added many since. Then there are ones we know only by 'farm names'--the 'green, curly earth worms' and 'fairy parasol mushrooms', and things we know only by broad category--slime molds, insects smaller than 1/4' long, etc. Then there are all the species we've deliberately planted here, and all the livestock and their parasites and disease organisms. Family members, friends, housemates, volunteers, visitors, customers, suppliers. Far-away supporters who know the farm through my writing. The elements, both chemical and weather. The machines and tools that we use, that come to life in our hands as we learn to know them. Everything that is woven into the web of life here.

I will read these names to let all these beings know that they are recognized, welcomed, and respected as equals in God's creation at the farm...a way of balancing the negation of these beings by the engineers who declare this to be 'undeveloped,' uninhabited land. To let these beings know that changes are coming, so they have time to prepare. To read to them the letter I received from the City. To ask them to share with me, in whatever way they can, their wisdom and ideas for the challenges that we will face together. I do not own this land, I only am its steward, and a spokesperson for its Community of Life: that has been my solemn understanding from the very beginning.

I will ground this reading with interspersed scripture readings, and invite those of other faiths or traditions to contribute as they wish.

I will keep these lists, and keep adding to them, and read them at each turning of the season (God willing), inviting all to share in those readings.

As I am able, I will post these lists online somewhere, to share them with others. If possible, I will have the reading recorded.

I would like to invite anyone who wishes to have their name read as part of the farm's Community of Life, please send me an email (natalyalowther@hotmail.com) and let me know. If you plan to attend in person, it would be nice to know ahead, but feel free to just drop by. The way out to the pasture will be made obvious in some manner.

At Ease about Easements? InDeed....

Here is something that all "landowners" should be aware of, assuming this is not just a Douglas County quirk. Not all easements across your property are necessarily filed with the Register of Deeds at the County Courthouse. There may be easements that are not part of the public record at all...not accessible to your title insurance company...not easily accessible to you, unless you happen to know where to look and everyone happens to be standing around the office a little bit before quitting time.

A few days ago I emailed the City's legal staff to verify my understanding that they did not already have an easement through the farm that would have allowed them to blithely survey without permission to be there. The response was that they didn't know off the top of their head, they would have to look it up. Apparently that wasn't a high priority task.

Instead of bugging them about it (I do understand that bureaucrats are busy and their time is valuable to them), I took myself to the Register of Deeds office this afternoon to look for myself.

Probably many of you have never had occasion to do this. Perhaps you aren't even aware that you CAN. And if that is the case, you have no idea how willing and ready the good people there are to help you find the information you seek among their solemn shelves of giant volumes. Try it some rainy afternoon when you have a spare hour or two.

I learned about doing title searches when I worked at DPRA Incorporated in Manhattan, Kansas, a number of years ago. (I hope they missed any major damage by the tornado that struck very close to their offices last night. Mom and Dad's place, several miles away, was untouched. The building at KSU where Dad worked from the time I was in middle school until the time he retired was damaged.) I think that job, as strange as it seemed in context of my life before and after, was one of God's ways of preparing me for the work I am doing now, shepherding the farm through these governmental challenges.

This is how finding an easement or deed works:

You walk into the office, way up on the third floor, and people look up and move to greet you at the ancient marble counter. The sense of hush is far beyond what any modern library could imagine.

They escort you to a very impressively modern computer nearby, type in your name, and thus are able to find the Township, Range, and Section of your property's legal description. Of course, you could bring this with you (from your property tax statement or a mortgage), but they will be happy to look it up for you.

Then you are escorted to The Room. It appears to be a vault. The walls are lined with shelves of dark, worn volumes. There are cryptic labels on the shelves. Your guide refers to the scrap of paper she jotted down your legal description information on, draws out a volume, and opens it on a large table in the middle of the room.

The pages in the volume are small, about 5" x 10", and form tabs along the outer edge. They are bound to the book with rings, perhaps a dozen of them, so that new pages may be added as the decades slowly march through the turning-over of property. How easily she turns to the series of pages for your Township, Range and Section.

And here you begin. In this case, since we were concerned with easements, of which there would be few, we just started in 1912 (or so) and scanned down the column that indicated a code for the type of recording. E for easement, M for mortgage, D for Deed, various other arcane descriptors. For a title search, you would look for your name to appear about the date you bought the poperty, and note who you bought it from. Then you would look backwards in time to find when that person bought the property.

We found no easements recorded for the farm. I lingered a few minutes to note important names and dates in the farm's life: Dale Black, whom we purchased it from (11/16/95), had purchase it from a Taul Hibbard in 1950. We could find no record of it coming into Taul's hands...but some transfers of property are not recorded, if it is inherited for example. Or that deed may reside at the Jefferson County Courthouse, dating from before the Douglas County line was moved north of the river course. Niggling curiousity that might be answered by a reading of the deed transfers we did identify, but not enough to spend the time reading them, white letters on black background, on the microfiche.

"Well," I sighed a relieved sigh. So at least they don't already own an easement that I'm not aware of."

"Um, actually there could be easements that we don't have records of here," the nice lady informed me. The fellow at the microfiche reader seemed to perk up his ears a bit.

A cold feeling washed through me. We had done quite careful research into this land before purchasing it, exactly to prevent such an occurrence as this. Had we missed something major that could undo years of planning and hard work?

"Yes, the County Public Works may have Road Right of Ways that aren't recorded here."

"Where are they recorded?"

"Public Works would know. Here's the name of the guy you can call."

"Would my Title Insurance Company have known about this? How do people know where to look for all the easements?" I asked, bewildered.

The nice lady turned to the fellow at the microfiche, who was now following our conversation quite intently even as his hands nimbly handled the file reader. "You're with a Title Insurance Company," she said. "Do you have access to the Public Works files?"

"No," he replied. "They aren't a part of the public record. That's why every document has that wording on it about "subject to easements."

You think you own your land. The Register of Deeds thinks you own your land. The Title Insurance company thinks you own your land. But no one is really sure whether there is some other party that has rights to your land that you do not. Just keep that in mind when you're making plans...someone else might be making plans, too.

I called the County Public Works guy she referred me to, expecting layers of bureaucracy and frustrations. "You're just leaving the Courthouse?" (The marvel of cell phones!) "Why don't you just run over and we'll have a look."

I did. He did. We found nothing. Just to be sure, we went in search of another fellow with a faster computer and checked somewhere else. Everyone was very nice, that ready-to-go-home-but-we-have-half-an-hour-to-kill kind of nice on a day when probably there hadn't been many other visitors. They delighted in printing me out a copy of the aerial of the farm area with all the property lines in clear blue.

Interesting. Very interesting. Go do your homework! If you own property, it would behoove you to know who else is entitled to use it without your permission. If you are purchasing property, by all means wring as much information as you can (in a friendly and respectful way) from the various government agencies. Because you may actually turn up information that the Title Insurance Company can't.

The Neighborhood Meeting

Thank you to all who have held me and the farm and the water main in your thoughts and prayers these past few days. Just knowing you were doing that surely contributed to the sense of serenity I felt during most of the meeting...but only God could have arranged for there to be a rainbow in the sky after the meeting, reminding me that He does hear and respond to prayers, and that He look after the arks He asks His servants build for Him, even little ones like the farm that carry mainly small creepy things like ants and very few interesting things like elephants....

Put that on my gratitude list: Of all the challenges I DO have on this farm, I DON'T have elephants...or moose or bears, like my farmer friend in British Columbia who called out of the blue this evening for a nice long chat. Her computer is kaput so she had no idea all this was going on here.

It was good, at the meeting, to sit quietly and listen to my neighbors voice some of the same questions I have about the project. I know that I am not alone.

During the meeting, the presenter kept suggesting that we break up into small groups to address specific landowner questions. The crowd didn't seem to want that, and it pretty much didn't happen. We want to hear what the City says to our neighbors. We're like that in North Lawrence. We mind our own business on most little things, but when push comes to shove we mind each other's business just as well as any self-respecting small town! Lawrence, "proper"--Lawrence south of the river--may be becoming a big city, but North Lawrence is very slow to lose its collective identity of not REALLY belonging to the city. At one time the Douglas County line followed the Kansas River, and the town of North Lawrence was a separate municipality affiliated with Jefferson, not Douglas County.

A friend noted after the meeting that it appeared the City people very much wanted to address the farm as a "special" situation, one on one, away from the public meeting. It seemed as if there were issues and questions they didn't want to address publicly. However, they conceded to keep me in the public conversation, and agreed to let us have a copy of the attendee sign-in sheet so that we could report back to one another what we learn in our individual meetings with the City and engineers.

It seems as if they consider this alignment through the farm as pretty much a "done deal", though they are looking at other options. But along the way they must jump through many other hoops before committing to take my land...testing of soil and groundwater, an Environmental Impact Study, etc. I know from my work in developing our Conservation Reserve Program Riparian Buffer Strips (a.k.a. "CRP" or "Wilderness Area") that such detailed investigation can turn up surprises that change the best-laid plans. We had originally wanted to construct a wetland on the north part of the pasture, since it seemed to be wet a lot of the time anyway. Testing revealed that the soil would never hold water, no matter what we did to it...when it was wet, it was because the water table under the whole farm was that high! I was disappointed to not be able to have my own permanent "frog bog", but the qualities of highground water and excellent drainage ARE part of what makes it so valuable as crop land!

It was interesting to hear again and again the phrases "developed land" and "undeveloped land" be bandied about. Of course, by "undeveloped land" they meant no roads, buildings, utilities, or other "city" infrastructure. This is a way of thinking that I believe our culture must change if we are to feed and otherwise support ourself in a future of increasingly inadequate and more expensive fuel supplies.

Every inch of my 12+ acres is "developed", in my way of thinking. I have built fences, planted and managed pastures, planted trees to shelter the farm from city noise, light pollution, and buffeting winter winds. I am developing outstanding wildlife habitat that is home to thousands of different species from all kingdoms of life, many that we will never reasonably be able to include in a census. I have had a development plan for this farm since several years before I even bought the land: the original Pinwheel Farm was designed on paper as a final project in a KSU horticulture class.

Stay tuned for further "developments".....!

And the good stuff....

I haven't written for a long time because we--a shifting, ever-changing"we"--have been so busy.
Some highlights:

Friends from Canada visited overnight. The 30-something mom and her daughter (same age as my granddaughter) made their second annual stop on their "Grand Tour" bus trip. Using the bus company's special 30-day pass, they travel at night, sleep on the bus (no hotel bills), spend the day (or overnight at a friend's or hostel) sightseeing, and then another night on the bus while they head for their next destination. In this way, they have seen FAR more of the U.S. that most citizens ever see. I really admire their stamina...esp. since the mom has mobility challenges and chronic pain. We met at a Canadian Quaker gathering while I was on sabbatical.

We have our first WWOOFer staying and working at the farm. It has been delightful! She fit right in with our household, and is a pleasant, self-starting, dependable worker on the farm, always willing to stop and attend to some little task that she notices needs done. We hope she'll come back in future years, since her current itinerary allows only a short stay. Another WWOOFer is scheduled for later this summer and fall. For those not familiar with WWOOF, it is an organization that helps connect farmers with people who want to volunteer on farms in exchange for room and board. Check out http://www.wwoofusa.org/index.html. A great way to travel (more to my taste than my friends' bus trek--I like to get to know a place and its people and critters and plants).

My daughter's 2 long-haired chihuahuas stayed at the farm for a few days....cute and SHRILL. Actually I was impressed with how quickly they settled in. I forgot to get pictures, though. Harper looks like a miniature of my older dog, Toss.

We've had rain upon rain, lots of wind and lightning, thankfully not much hail. It's a good thing we don't rely on mechanical tillage for our gardening. We've been hard at work muching our no-till beds for tomatoes and potatoes. As of today, we have about 180 plants in the ground. A crazy quilt of standard production hybrids, popular and obscure heirlooms, slicers, paste style, cherry tomatoes, you name it. Striped, red, orange, yellow, gold, purple, green. One thing they mostly share is they are indeterminate varieties. We plant them 2 feet apart with beds 10' apart (there is a non-tomato bed between each pair of tomato beds). This allows air circulation and access for picking. It looks silly at this stage...but experience proves that they WILL be 6' tall and 4' wide by the end of August.

In one block, we experimented with wheat as a fall cover crop, broadcast on a weedy fallow area that was garden a couple years ago. Where we got a good dense stand of wheat, we just mowed out the tomato beds and left the wheat to ripen in 7' x 23' bands in between. It is starting to turn color, with nice large heads! We'll harvest by hand, then mulch and plant in the wheat beds between the tomato rows. We have a small graingrinder that will allow us to make cracked wheat for cereal, or coarse flour. Other friends have better grinding equipment if we make this a habit.

Mowing around the tomato beds was an experimental thing. We "inherited" a BCS walk-behind tractor, with rototiller and sickle bar mower attachments, this winter, and have been experimenting to see how it fits into our production system. It mows wheat and tall weeds very well, turning a fallow area into a partly mulched garden in a matter of minutes. It also will cut through chainlink fence quite nicely. It does balk a bit at T-posts, though that was a stalemate--non-fatal damage to both post and mower.

We make sure the dogs are locked up in their pen before using the BCS mower.

In summary, we decided that the BCS is great for mowing large patches of tall stuff where we are certain there are no metal objects, and we don't have to be perfect. The Austrian Scythe proved to be the best tool for mowing out the narrow, precise beds for the tomatoes. So, we are working hard to be more deliberate about putting things away, and the farm is looking very much more organized and tidy than ever. This also makes things easier for our wonderful volunteers to find things.

The wheat was dense enough that we were able to mulch the tomato beds with it, after laying down a narrow band of very broken-down sheep pen waste as a "fertility mulch". This is an effort to "stretch" our waste hay mulch. A consequence of a very wet spring/early summer, combined with a late start and having the best mulch-hauling cart out of commission for awhile early in the season, is that the hay pack in the sheep pens had decomposed beyond the prime weed-control-mulching stage already. So we are making do and experimenting. Another experiment is using the new (gasoline) riding lawnmower to collect grass clippings from the yard and lanes and using those as mulch. This promises to be a great way of augmenting potato mulch as it gets scattered around during our rummaging for new potatoes.

Speaking of new potatoes, we rummaged out the very first tiny new potatoes from "Pink Wink" (the first variety we planted, one that isn't even sold in catalogs that we got as a substitute a couple years ago, and has ended up being a real favorite). The WWOOFER, the Growing Growers apprentice, and I all savored a "potato communion" when I boiled those few tubers this morning. MMMMMMM...THAT'S why we're doing all this hard work! It will be a few weeks before we have enough to take to market, but we know they're coming!

We are also using the BCS tiller for the first mechanical tillage we've done in years. Accepting the negative consequence of compacted soil structure, we're "stale bedding" a large (75' x 25') area near the garden where Sweet Annie (sweet, indeed, but invasive and not eaten by any farm animal) and Japanese Hop Vine (a.k.a. "vegetable barbed wire") were allowed to proliferate by the tenants a few years ago. We'll plant in there soon, now that we've killed 4 or 5 crops of seedlings, and then clean cultivate (no mulch, lots of hoeing) the rest of the season, in an attempt to kill as many weed seeds as we can and not produce any more.

I have mixed feelings about the new gas-powered equipment, but overall they are very helpful at this stage in the farm's life, and I'm very grateful for them and the dedicated friend who likes to run them.

Water Line Meeting, June 12

Last week, I received a letter from the City of Lawrence about the "Kaw Water Treatment Plant Water Transmission Main." There will be a "Neighborhood Information Meeting" Thursday, June 12, from 6:30 to 7:30 at Woodlawn School, 508 Elm St. in North Lawrence (first street on the east, north of the Bridge)

Please attend this meeting if you are able. If not, please hold us in your thoughts and prayers.

*****

Who should be concerned about this water line project and how it is planned to be built in the backyards of people who didn't get to vote for the people who decided that it should be in their backyards?

--Anyone who pays taxes in the City of Lawrence...this is how the City is spending them.

--Anyone who owns property near the City of Lawrence...your business or back yard may be next.

--Actually, anyone who owns property, period...just as a sobering reflection that you really don't have much control over "your" land, just the obligation to pay taxes on it until some government wants to use it.

--Especially, anyone who says "But they can't DO that" when you hear that the City's contractor trespassed to do surveying on my pasture, or that the City can use Eminent Domain to forcibly TAKE my land even though it's not in the City (yet).

****

Interestingly, the letter was addressed "Dear Lawrence Resident"--as though I am already a Lawrence resident. When I noticed this, a chill went down my spine. I do not want to EVER be a Lawrence Resident. I am a Douglas County resident. That is where I bought my land, and where I want my land to stay.