My "F" Word

An acquaintance--as in someone who hasn't known me long or well--signed off in an email with the thought that "we could all use some fun."

Folks who've know me awhile are more circumspect about throwing the "f" word around without proper consideration. The rant gets old (if I forget they've heard it before), or they get tired of that certain puzzled look I give them. "The look" that says, "I thought we WERE having fun!?!" Only they didn't think so, apparently. And they still can't see it. In that moment, we realize we live in different universes that somehow intersect but don't connect. Those moments aren't so fun because there is a certain bittersweet loneliness to having fun alone in the midst of a crowd of people who aren't.

There seems to be a cultural understanding of "fun" that excludes "work", and vice versa--and an idea that "fun" is desireable, with few reservations, and that "work" is not, in and of itself, desireable except as a means to the end of having the "fun" that the money from working can facilitate.

Huh?

That didn't even make sense to me BEFORE I started farming.

I guess the closest I've ever been able to translate the word "fun" in my world view is "enjoyable" and/or "exciting"...and just about EVERYTHING, pretty much, can be enjoyable or exciting or both, for me. Even bookkeeping, once I get started on it (my plan for tonight). Doing chores in the pouring rain, once I'm out there, as long as I'm not hypothermic yet or being bludgeoned by hail. Pulling weeds--fun to test my strength if they are tough ones, fun to make progress if they are easy ones, fun to see the livestock scramble after them, fun to see the happy plants in nice tidy beds where I've finished. Fun to eat the yummy weeds. Fun to abolish the bad ones.

Fun to hear the birds, fun to think that the neighbor with his gas-powered weeder (rototiller) is missing the birds' free concert, fun to pet the cat when he wanders by, fun to feel the sun/wind/rain on my back, fun to stop and watch the biplane droning overhead, fun to throw a stick to the dogs, fun to look around at this beautiful farm that has created itself over the course of 12 years with my help, and the help of many others.

Fun to see the shadows shift as the day passes, fun to realize they have changed with the passing seasons, fun to see the cycles and the patterns of it all.

Fun to be an intimate part of it all.

Fun for everything I do to be a part of being a part of it. Therefore fun to drive the bus, fun to visit friends, fun to build things, fun to clean things, fun to tear things down, fun to throw things away.

Fun to go to Farmer's Market, fun picking the vegetables, fun washing them, fun getting up that early, fun being that tired, fun in the rain and snow and sun, fun hanging on the canopy so it doesn't blow away, fun dashing home to unload and turn into a bus driver. And fun taking a day off from that, as I did today.

Fun setting boundaries, fun insisting that rules be applied fairly, fun pointing out blind spots and inconsistencies, fun being a pain in the neck to people who take it all too seriously or not seriously enough. Fun dotting the Is and crossing the Ts...and dotting the Ts and crossing the Is. Fun persevering until nonsensical situations are resolved to everyone's benefit (today, can you imagine Farmer's Market without meat sales? Fun overturning that old rule a few years back!).

Fun everywhere. Nearly all the time.

But don't ask me to set my real life aside and go looking for fun at the amusement park...the city pool (Fun? Have you read all the warnings and disclaimers posted there about water-born illnesses?), the movie theatre, the bar...anywhere else removed from my daily life. I'll give you "the look."

Or--I might just say, "That sounds like fun!"

Tomorrow, part of my fun will be mowing...weeding...mulching...working on fences...working on the privy...cleaning house. And part will be a combined Shape Note Singing, picnic, and carillon concert by one of the singers at the KU Campanile, starting at 4:00.

Anyone's welcome to join me for any of it. The more, the merrier!

README before farming

I'm writing this for those readers who are settling in to enjoy their Independence Day holiday tomorrow, dreaming that someday they, too, might have their own little bit of a farm like mine. Dreaming of the simple life. The slower pace. The reduced stress. True independence.

Most of all, I'm writing for the dozens if not hundreds of single women (frequently with small children) that I've met who envision doing this ALONE, way out in the country "away from it all."

Forget it. Please. Quit while you're ahead, before you've sunk your life savings into it.

Farming is pretty much an all-or-nothing job...at least an integrated farm like this one. Once you've got the system figured out and up and running (more or less), the seasons just roll around in orderly fashion (give or take a late hard freeze), the chore cycles ebb and flow predictably, one thing leads to another. Momentum keeps it going. It keeps YOU going. Most of the time.

But then HUMAN things come up. Like getting sick.

Wednesday I woke up feeling not very good. I'd eaten a light supper the previous night, so maybe I was just extra hungry? I cooked my usual breakfast. The toast tasted great, but somehow I just didn't feel like eating the eggs. Not very good at all.

I dragged through the morning, getting a few long-delayed tasks done like hitching up the scrap metal trailer and taking it to the recycler's a few blocks away. It's not entirely a bad thing to procrastinate on a few non-critical, unintellectual, fiscally rewarding tasks like that so that you have something useful to do on days when you are not feeling up to par. Most of the morning was spent trying to evaluate whether I felt good enough to drive a bus for 7 1/2 hours.

As I went through the morning, what little energy I'd awakened with waned. I decided to call in sick to work--something I really hated doing, because I think they think I'm yet another irresponsible driver taking an extra day off before the holiday. Trust me, I REALLY would rather have been at work!

Good call. About the time I'd have started driving, breakfast came up. And maybe part of dinner. The rest of the afternoon I drifted between sleeping and heading to the bathroom again.

At some point I remembered that the sheep needed to be moved to fresh pasture. Thankfully, two of my volunteers had planned to work here that evening. So I tried to give them instructions for where the sheep were (over on Chaney's pasture which is west of the shady area where the swing is, which is west of the little corner pasture....), where they needed to be (in the main pasture north of the willows but not through the central lane, through the 16' panel gate on the west end of the willows) and what adjustments needed to be made to the electric fence in order to contain them (go through the little panel gate to the left just after you go in the 16' panel gate, then follow the 4-wire fence back to the green-cote fence and hook it up to the green cote).
We got out the aerial photo of the farm and pointed. I repeated directions as clearly as possible with my foggy brain. They went trouping off into the wilderness.

If you DO try this at home, be sure everyone has cell phones. It's maybe a 5 minute walk from those pens to the house, including the time for opening and closing gates along the way. Not so far? Multiply that by several questions and clarifications in the course of the task...cell phones saved a lot of time and energy that day.

Several calls later, we all felt reasonably sure everything was as it should be. One of the volunteers graciously ran to the gas station 4 blocks away and brought back Gatorade...lots of Gatorade. By that point I was seriously concerned about ending up dehydrated from the afternoon's activities.

Today I'm feeling much better. Even so, it took the better part of the day to get around to dragging myself out to the pasture to check on the sheep and make sure they had enough grass for the night, and figure out their rotations for the next few days.

I rarely get sick like that. And as time goes by, the farm is better laid out and more organized for people to be able to help me. And I have more people available to help out. It is still a sobering experience. If I were sick for several days, how long could volunteers manage the rotational grazing and the web of electric fences? What if I get sick in late July, when nearly everyone is planning to be on vacation?

Speaking of vacations, that's another thing to think about before you commit to farming. Vacations are a LOT of work.

I was planning an overnight Independence Day visit to friends in Jamesport, MO, about 2 1/2 hours away. Even for less than 24 hours away, the arrangements get complex.

You who can just jump in your car and take off, appreciate it! First I arranged to borrow a car--the key to the whole trip, since I can't afford gas to drive the truck there, at 10 miles per gallon. When that was arranged, I called my friends to let them know I was coming. I called the Farmer's Market coordinator and let her know that I was taking the day off from market (a significant loss of income, but sometimes I just need a break since I'm doing market totally solo this year). I arranged for someone to come get the dogs and take them to a relatively fireworks-free location for the evening, since both dogs are terrified of fireworks. And I made arrangements with my evening chore person to handle chores a bit differently since the dogs would be leaving. I made plans to rotate the sheep right before I left, and to return from the trip with plenty of time to rotate them before heading off to drive the bus Sat. afternoon.

This evening the car-loaner called to let me know that it wasn't going to work for him to loan me the car, after all. Too late for me to try to borrow a different car...at 6:30 on Thursday, probably everyone who was planning to take off for the weekend and leave their other car unused in the driveway, had already left.

So I had to un-arrange as many arrangements as I could. I'll still skip market...at least that will be like a little mini-vacation, even if it's less than unpaid.

A farm is NOT a permanent vacation. When you need a break--and you WILL need a break-- who will cover for you? When you are sick or injured, who will care for the livestock and keep things going? A farm doesn't stop when you do. It is crucial to keep these things in mind before you even start. Maybe the best time to dream a farm is when you are flat on your back with the flu. In your delirious state, try motivating yourself to go out to break ice off a water tank in a blizzard...mend an electric fence in 99 degrees, 99% humidity...chase sheep out of the garden in a hailstorm...and there's always the classic call from the neighbor way down the street, "I think your goose is walking down my driveway."

A wise friend once said, "The real distance of a country house from town is 3 times the round-trip distance to the nearest hardware store...because that is how far you will have to drive every time you fix the plumbing." So true! Now I'll add to that--consider also the distance to the nearest purveyor of Gatorade. And the nearest troup of AWESOME, much-appreciated, essential volunteer chore-doers.

Touching Your Food

I'm sure some readers are picturing me eating those windfall apricots off the ground and thinking, "ew, gross". And others are retching at the very thought of eating something (even apricot preserves, twice boiled and THEN carefully processed with the Boiling Water Bath method) that a squirrel had held and even nibbled. After all, squirrels could carry rabies (and there's probably a deadly Squirrel Flu going around that hasn't hit the media yet).

Those are food boundaries that each person has to set for themselves. And we need to respect one another's boundaries. Just as someone being vegetarian or vegan doesn't offend me as an omnivore, someone not wanting to eat something a squirrel has nibbled on doesn't offend me. If you ever eat at my house, you are welcome to ask what has touched your food, and I will give you the most honest answer I can, and try my best to serve you food that doesn't push your boundaries. But I do invite you to consider your boundaries mindfully, and see if there are perhaps some inconsistencies in them. Most of us let inconsistent boundaries needlessly limit our possibilities.

I've been thinking about the issue of touching food a lot lately, because of a situation at Farmer's Market a couple weeks ago.

I plant my lettuce varieties in separate beds, because they grow better that way. Each one needs harvested a little differently, so I like to give them individual attention. I harvest them separately (usually) and display each variety separately at Farmer's Market, complete with variety names. Folks enjoy the names and the colorful display--you can really appreciate the different textures and colors in a row of 5 or 6 tubs of red, green, smooth, frills.

I harvest the lettuce into net bags (dollar store laundry bags, to be specific--there, a trade secret!), and plunge the filled bags into cold well water to rinse off any sand and to remove the"field heat" from the lettuce...an important step when picking in 80-degree weather. A 15-minute soak, then stacking the dripping bags in mesh crates in the shade, is all the refridgeration my lettuce gets. You'd be amazed at how well it freshens up and keeps that way, even if it's starting to be a bit "tired" in the garden by the time I'm picking the last variety on a hot morning. At any rate, it's hardly a careful washing--just a good dunk and swish.

I sell my lettuce by the pound, mix and match, often with interesting non-lettuce options available for adventurous salad-eaters. The customer "takes what s/he likes and leaves the rest", and I put it on the scale and calculate the price. Other vendors mostly sell pre-weighed, pre-packaged "large bag/small bag". Some customers like that they don't have to buy an entire "small bag," which may be quite big to someone cooking for one.

At first, I tried having tongs for customers to use. They proved clumsey, damaging to the lettuce, easily broken, and easily lost or left behind at home. After some thought, I just dispensed with the tongs. Now, customers are invited to use their hands "as a reminder that you need to wash it yourself when you get it home...I can't give it the careful attention you can when I'm picking so much."

I've observed that very few customers handle any lettuce but what they put in their bag. It's not a crop where one sorts out a particular size or shape (as with potatoes), and it's already sorted by type. The customer's hands are likely more clean than my own, since I'm handling more money as well as all the vegetables and wool products. Normally customers are perfectly happy with this arrangement.

But one customer stopped in horror when she was asked to use her own hands. "You mean people have TOUCHED this? Oh, I CAN'T buy it!"

I went through my "you need to wash it anyway" spiel, but that did not mollify her.

"No, I just can't shop at your booth! Here, I don't want these green onions after all." She dropped the bundle of onions, dirt still clinging to the roots, back onto the pile as if it were contaminated, shuddering in horror at the thought that someone might have touched food she had been hoping to eat.

"Yes, perhaps that would be best. You might want to try Dillons or HyVee." I tried to be gentle and friendly as she walked away, still muttering and shuddering.

I tried to think of vegetables never touched by human hands. Vegetables grown in factory-like conditions, with automatic sprayers and waterers and harvesters and packagers. Maybe organic, but industrial organic.

And THAT is the sort of production environment where the disease-tainted spinach came from a few years ago, and was shipped all over the country!

Many veggies are hard to harvest by machine. In thinking of conventional large-scale vegetable crop production, one must picture an endless monoculture field, rows upon rows of some crop dotted with workers bending over the rows picking. They are touching your food. Maybe they are in a foreign country where there is little regard for sanitation. Maybe they are very poor and not very healthy. Maybe they have Tb--migrant farm workers aren't required to be tested. Or some other contagious disease. Maybe toilet paper and hand sanitizer aren't part of their culture. Maybe they just finished spraying a crop, or smoking.

But you don't see it. It's remote, removed. All you see is the nice, uniform stacks of veggies in the supermarket--how pretty! The stocker tends the display, turning the most beautiful pieces up, fluffing and organizing, handling your food. Customers come there, too, and paw through the stack, touching your food.

Just personally, I want my food to be touched: by a farmer who loves growing it, and smiles into my eyes when I buy his/her gorgeous labor of love. By myself, gratefully picking out the perfect pieces I'll enjoy eating. And yes, by another customer who loves fresh veggies as much as I do, if that happens by chance. I think the people in my community are better qualified to touch my food than strangers half a world away. And the squirrels are part of my community, too--so the apricot thing doesn't bother me.

If the shuddering lady would rather have her food touched by a malnourished, uneducated child laborer in a far-off land, I guess that's her choice. But I pretty much guarantee many people have touched her food.

I hope she doesn't give it too much thought, and stop eating entirely.

Apricot Answers

God is wise. I am not so wise. I think I'll keep working on trusting His wisdom even when it doesn't mesh with my ideas.

Thus I am up at 1 a.m. typing this.

I've been reflecting on God's subtle and infinite wisdom as I washed up the almost inconceivable pile of utensils after rendering apricots into puree and putting it in bags for the freezer.

Last year, we had a bitterly hard freeze in late April...the legendary "Easter Freeze". It killed ALL local (and regional) fruit except for a few raspberries, grapes, and persimmons. How sad a summer (and fall, and winter) without apples!

But last year I was a year younger, a year more stressed, a year less experienced a bus driver, a year less adapted to balancing the work of the farm with the work of driving AND with taking care of myself physically, emotionally, spiritually. And I had a lot less of a support community around the farm to help me balance things.

As much as I chafed at not being able to make applesauce last year, I now soberly realize that I COULD NOT have tried to do any food preservation (beyond throwing tomato chunks in the freezer) and stayed sane.

THIS year, this year that is blessed with the most bountiful fruit crop in Pinwheel Farm's history, I CAN balance all this...after a fashion. And this year is the first, in about 5 or 6 years of production, that the squirrels have left any apricots for me.

It's a "Sweetheart" apricot--bred so that the usually-inedible pits can be eatenlike nuts. The squirrels did not have to read the Stark Bros. catalog to figure that out, right off the bat. Usually they strip the tree bare of fruit while the 'cots are still hard and green, throwing little chips of green flesh onto the ground and eating the nuts. Before this year I had eaten exactly HALF an apricot from it...and that was salvaged from the ground, dropped by a clumsy squirrel.

This year there are many whole, ripe windfalls--even ones without worms! They are incredibly delicious! There are also a LOT of large fragments of fruit that the squirrels are discarding in their quest for the nuts.

I had asked God if please maybe I could get enough apricots for one batch of jam, please, evenif the squirrels had the rest. Just one?

As I picked up windfalls the other night, I kept looking at those lovely big seedless chunks. I started picking them up--a little brown on the edges, but otherwise fresh-seeming. An idea started to form, and I called to consult with Mom: Would YOU let all that apricot rot, or would you pick up the pieces and stew them half to death and make jam with them? Mom gave the go-ahead.

So I carefully trimmed the bad spots off, and boiled up the scraps with some windfall green apples. Sweetened to taste, WOW is that ever good! I ended up with 4 1/2 pints, which is already being shared with the main farm volunteers.

Tonight I just trimmed, cooked, and pureed the harvest of scraps, and put three bags (= 3 batches of jam = about 15 pints) in the freezer.

God MORE than answered my plea for apricots, but I had to be willing to accept His terms: His squirrels eat, too. I'm so grateful that I was able to see that there was enough for all of us...it would have been so easy to think they had gotten all the fruit again.

I'm also accumulating black raspberries in the freezer for jam. By freezing fruit or puree, I can do the hot, steamy work of making and canning jam when I WANT the heat and humidity, not when I'm running the air conditioner. And I can do it around my work schedule more easily.

It's a lot of work. But so satisfying. And SO delicious.

Directions to Pinwheel Farm

Two events at the farm this week: The Reading of Names, on Sunday morning, and a hands-on work day for an Environmental Anthropology class from KU on Thursday. Directions to the farm are located at http://pinwheelfarm.blogspot.com/2007/12/directions-to-pinwheel-farm.html.

We'll try to have the circle drive open, and shady parking available, for both events. Entrance to the circle drive is from the main house drive, as normal. It just makes getting out easier if there are a lot of cars. Please always park so as not to block the driveway, so that other vehicles can still get in and out. Thanks!

What's the Fuss?

I had just posted the last entry, when Luna started barking furiously, and I heard the unmistakeable screaming of a chicken in dire distress. I jumped into shoes, grabbed a light, and ran to the chicken coop. The desperate screeching and squawking continued unabated.

Normally (yes, this is a "normal" "everyday" experience in some seasons, I'm afraid...and around the full moon it's usually worse...) the squawking would have moved across the field as the fox or coyote ran off with its bounty, or it would have stopped with the bird's demise. But this time the squawking just went on and on, from the coop.

As I approached the coop, I could see that several birds were in the outer pen, acting agitated. All the sheep and the guardian llama were gathered close outside the chicken pen, watching. Eventually I got to where I could see into the coop. A chicken was screaming and beating its wings frantically, upside down, near the roost.

WHAT THE ?!?

Somehow the poor bird had gotten ONE toe caught in a wire lining the wall of the coop, about 3 feet off the ground, and was hanging very unhappily by that toe. I quickly cradled her body, taking the weight off while I worked the toe loose. She flapped away into the yard, apparently unharmed.

How DID this come to be?

I ran the light around the coop, looking for clues. A shadow in a nest box rated a second look...no, not a shadow but a skunk, huddled in a lower nest, staring back at me without blinking. He was so motionless, I thought I might be able to run back to the house for the camera. I laid the light on the floor, to encourage him to stay put. When I moved the light to floor, the hens all panicked and flew at the walls of the coop. Evidently the skunk had scared them in a similar fashion, resulting in the stuck bird.

Mr. Skunk was still there when I returned with the camera, as still as a statue. He remained motionless while I boldly crawled under the roost to get a close picture. I actually was holding the camera about 2 feet from the nest box for the above photo, and he never moved.

It was very late. I was tired. I decided to just go to bed and let Nature take its course. The skunk could choose either chicken food or chicken for dinner. I mean really, what was I going to do about it? Pick the skunk out of the nest box and throw him over the fence, and say "Bad skunk, go home now!?"

The chickens were all fine in the morning.

When J. and E. came for the livestock seminar on Thursday, they expressed concern about our potato planting activities. They had come Wednesday while I was at work, to plant a few more beds of potatoes in between the recently-planted tomato rows. "What's up with the southwest block in the southwest quadrant? Did YOU plant there, and forget to write it down on the bed map?" J. asked.

"No," I replied, puzzled. "I'm very careful to write things down...and I haven't planted any potatoes this week. What makes you think I did?" (The bed maps are our only record of what's planted where, so we keep careful track. The maps also include information about planting dates, varieties, sources, soil management, etc.)

"It looked like someone had dug all along the row, just like when we plant potatoes through the mulch. But nothing's marked on the map."

I thought for a bit. "Maybe the skunk?" I replied. I'd noticed skunk diggings in several of the mulched blocks. They like to look for grubs under the mulch.

"But they're in perfectly straight lines, right down the marked rows!" We all puzzled over that for awhile. Why would the skunk dig in straight lines?

Then I realized that was a block where we'd put very rich sheep pen waste only along the planting bed area, and mulched the paths between the beds with "unsheeped" old hay. Evidently the grubs were in the manurey sheep mulch, and not in the plain hay, and the skunk knew it. We all got a laugh!

All in all, I have a soft spot for skunks...have had, most of my life. Among other things, I like the looks of black and white animals...one glance around the farm gives you a clue about that!

When I was little Mom read us "Jimmy Skunk books" as bed-time stories, over and over again (M., does this surprise you?). There were many wonderful animal characters in Thorton Burgess's nature stories, but Jimmy Skunk was my favorite by far. Thorton Burgess really knew his animals, and in personifying them he vividly portrayed the natural animal's temperaments as a key part of the stories. (Sadly, his books have fallen out of favor, because his animal characters also portrayed racist and political stereotypes of his times.) Pushing the camera into the chicken coop skunk's face was thinkable mainly because Jimmy Skunk made it very clear when I was little that skunks are slow to anger, and would just as soon walk away from an argument. Treated with respect, they show an indifferent, detached, benign tolerance of just about anything. I have even brushed agianst them in nest boxes, gathering eggs in the dark, in the past!

My first (and pretty much last) childhood stuffed animal was a skunk. Mom sewed it out of velveteen for me for Christmas when I was about 5. I loved that skunk! Alas, it was left at a picnic area while travelling between California and Tennesee, and the loss was not discovered until many hours down the road. Probably the greatest loss of my childhood was the loss of that beloved velveteen skunk.

But now I've got the real thing. And he may be even cuter.

Past Entanglements, Present Tense

It's ba-ack....

One knows the inflection of that phrase from hearing it in common use, in so many contexts, even if one doesn't even know what movie it's from. Such is our culture.

Last year, we only discovered one tiny plant of dodder, in a fallow area.

This year, suddenly there was a large, vigorous clump of the eery orange tendrils strangling one of our precious Pink Wink potato plants. EEEK!

At least it was a chance for apprentice J. to examine this pernicious parasitic weed. We carefully gathered up every fragment, pulling up the weeds it had attached to. We treat dodder and affected hosts as biohazard waste...which it is. We pulled it ever so carefully off of Pink Wink, and left the plant. We'll watch to see if it truly does regenerate from material remaining in the host plant vascular tissue, even though we've removed every external trace. (Sorry, I have not been able to figure out how to rotate photos since a computer revamp changed my photo viewing program.)

This parasitic plant became established on the farm while the tenants were here during my sojourn in Canada a couple years ago. Instead of doing some research and doing everything they could to eradicate it, when it started taking over patches of vegetables they just ignored it! They allowed it to seed, then they ran a rototiller through the contaminated bed and spread it all around! It was also allowed to seed prolifically on the pasture, and spread by animals dragging fragments of the tendrils onto host plants. It can regenerate from a small fragment that falls on a host plant.

Favorite hosts in the garden include tomatoes, potatoes, and onions...some of our favorites, too. In the pasture, it favors the best legume forages--red clover, for example. Though it's not supposed to attack grasses, it certainly seemed to be inserting itself into the vascular tissues of the foxtail grass in the potato bed.

It has no clorophyll. It has no roots. It draws all nutrients from the host plant. It wraps around the host, inserts itself into the host's tissues, and draws all water and sustenance fromt here. It isn't affected by herbicides because it doesn't grow like a plant; you can, however, use herbicides to kill it indirectly by killing the host. Not much gain there, if it's in a crop!

Where it attaches to a host, it can send out up to 25 tendrils, seeking other hosts to attach to. each attachment point can grow those 25 tendrils at a rate of several inches a day. Small severed fragments can attach and grow if they fall on a host.

The one plant-like thing it does is reproduce by seed. Thousands of seeds that can stay viable in the soil for 30 years.

This plant is one serious reason for not wanting the City to run construction euipment through our farm to build the pipeline. If seed is transported to our neighbor to the east, it could be a real disaster in his soybean field. Even one seed from my farm could result in a totally infected field, if he fails to notice that seed establishing a colony. He doesn't walk his soybeans nearly as frequently as I walk my pasture, and likely woulnd't notice a patch before it seeded profusely.

Where did this plant come from, to begin with? At first I suspected vegetable seeds. But then I discovered that dodder seed is banned--zero tolerance--in seeds offered for sale in all 50 states...the only such plant. Now I suspect it came steathily in a bale of hay, nearly-ripe seeds entwined around a bit of alfalfa.

Like the snapper, a bit of biodiversity I wouldn't mind doing without. Even if it is extremely fascinating, in its own creepy way.