HEY-O! Itās April!
Did you protect your tender sense of humor on April Foolās Day?
Did you protect your eyes during the eclipse?
Will you protect your eggs & young from ferocious predators?
Do your tender green babies need protection from voracious little nibblers? š
Are you constantly trying to find ways to protect your precious time? (Especially your precious make time?)
Welp, itās April and our feral theme is 110% PROTECT! And I am excited how the idea of āprotectā has unfurled over the last few days of reflection for me - and I canāt wait to see what we discover together this month.
Letās dive in š¤æ
Itās Spray Day!
So far I am surprisingly on track for early spring tasks around this farm-place. Seeding, weeding, planning, prep for the season. I am on schedule. It feelsā¦unusual. I think I am learning that this is the time of year when itās most important to stay on top of all the land maintenance, especially weeding, to get the place off to a good start and stay above water for the year.
Weeding takes a variety of forms here, because there are a lot of different āweedsā with a lot of different (and very specific) needs. There are perennial veggies, there are landscaped areas, perennial flower beds, prairie, and the hay field and the driveway and the rain garden and I think you get the point. There is hand weeding, mowing, lazy hand weeding, mulching, and ā¦ spraying.
Look look look. Had you asked me twenty, fifteen, or maybe even ten years ago if I could imagine myself with a backpack sprayer and definitely-not-organic herbicides protecting the farm, the landscape, and my back from invasive species I would have said, UM NO.
But fifteen acres and ten years and only small equipment and an exponentially exploding population of Canada thistle is a good recipe to change a girlās mind.
Do I love spraying yucky herbicides? Nope. Itās gross. Itās yucky. But have I very strategically calculated the risks and benefits of super-targeted spraying? Yes, yes I have.
First, there is more here than I could ever mow, weed whack, hand weed and/or burn on my own. (Than I could even manage if I had a tractor and a four-foot brush hog.) I donāt know if youāve ever met Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense) you donāt have a real arch nemesis in your life.
Canada thistle is (yes) a thistle - which means itās thorny and spindly and makes a lovely purple flower that turns into fluff and floats away (aka, does an excellent job of sending seeds out in the world). BUT to make it truly the worst, itās a perennial (unlike most of its thistle friends) and it propagates (ie, takes over the world) via both seeds AND a āvigorous root system that continually produces new shoots, invading new areas and outcompeting other vegetation typesā.
Pretty sure if you looked up resilient, gritty, irrepressible, enduring or persistent in the dictionary there would be a photo of the Canada thistle. They are practically undefeatable. They arenāt even forever-killed by the basic herbicides. They. Are. Monsters. Multi-headed monsters! (Because even if you pull up a single plant or rosette, the whole (very deep) root system and all the other plants itās connected to ARE STILL ALIVE. And I am pretty sure if you kill one leafy section, it just encourages the plant to send up even MORE shoots and leaves. (OMG, see HERE for an amazing root photo.)
So back to my calculationā¦as a human I canāt get rid of them using machines and my hands. And these little suckers are everywhere. Everywhere. Hayfield, fence lines, garden around the house, far field. EVERYWHERE. (Did you know if you till them, and [accidentally] chop up the roots each little piece of root can turn into itās own plant?! Thatās like science fiction level shit!)
Sure, preventing them from going to seed is one thing. But that doesnāt really mean anything, because that stupid plant and itās stupid roots are still going to grow and expand underground. So itās not enough to just mow it. You have to actively, willfully kill it WITH A VENGEANCE if you want to prevent its global reign. And the only way to do that (at this scale) is to spray the yucky chemicals.
So, kill the worst of them (or at the very least prevent them from spreading) with a few years of spraying and then targeted touchups as needed. Itās the only way.
Or, itās the only way if I want to have any other time in my life to do anything other than weed - like actually have time to plant prairie for the pollinators or food for us to eat or any of the other beneficial things that go on here.
In addition to full-on war mode against the Canada thistle, I do spray areas to prep them for planting (prairies or similar) because for long term success itās best to clear an area of all weeds and weed seeds, even before sheet mulching because lordy DID YOU KNOW WEEDS CAN GROW THROUGH CARDBOARD?!
So, today was spray day! Itās warm and sunny and not too windy. And itās going to be warm and dry for long enough to actually do something. I fill the little tank and hoist the four gallon plastic back back and get to it. And I was walking around and doing my spraying and thinking about how this is one form of PROTECT.
Protecting my future time and future space with this one little (unsavory) activity.
š§± š¹ š” ā šµ What do you think of when you see āPROTECTā? What do you most want to protect? How do you think about the idea of protection? Proactive? Defensive?
Sometimes I think of āprotectā as being an actively aggressive (more on that in a sec) - but what about all the ways that āprotectā is gentle preservation, careful boundaries, long-term ways to reduce āthreatsā? Protect time and space for the things that are good? Peaceful and gentle? Long-term and careful?
In putting together the Feral Calendar Themes for the year, this month of PROTECT was inspired by all the little baby animals entering the world and all the ways their elders try to protect them BUT MOSTLY Iām thinking of (if I recall correctly) all those red wing blackbirds that dive bomb me when I walk through the green green fast-growing grass where they are weaving their nests. How is it you can just sense when something is so ferociously protecting something important?
And, in turn, I did spend some thing thinking about how much thought and energy it takes (and how often I fail) at protecting my time and peace. Maybe more to say about that in an upcoming note. But Iād love to know what protect means to you, and what might be most useful for you to āprotectā this month / this spring / this year / this life.
Last shot, parting shotā¦ As I was walking around here yesterday, enjoying the sunshine and the very robust yellow daffodils and the tips of the peony shoots and the little poppy rosettes, I was also thinking about everything to come. And in that moment if felt like everything was holding still. Started, waiting, more to come. I wanted time to stand still. I wanted time to speed up. And then it came to me - maybe a better theme for this month is INCUBATE. The seed is planted. The egg is in the nest. Now we just keep that nugget warm and wait.
What are you protecting? What are you incubating?
Way past curfew! (Def not protecting my sleep tonight)
š¤ŗvanessa