week of 3/27/02
 
 
 

Before you know it, the season arrives
By John Beckman
A lot of things seem to be happening quickly these days. Maybe it’s the increasingly frantic pace of American life — or the fact that I have to look backwards to see 40 — that makes the pages fly off the calendar at an astounding rate like they did in the cartoons I remember as a kid. Sometimes it’s only a day, or an hour, or even a moment that passes with a significance, or a loss, or a missed opportunity that leaves us and our world changed, unable to be returned to its past. A day late and a dollar short, as thousands of parents have told their kids. Some of these things we can’t seem to avoid by our own account or best efforts. Auto accidents, stock price changes, loss of loved ones, terrorist acts, tornados and the like apparently operate outside of our control or intent, yet their impacts are paramount in our daily lives once they emanate, causing us to move on in a changed world. Others seem to be a little more under our control, but only if we’re alert enough to see them and do something pro-active about it.

Life in the mountains adds its own twists on this theme, making for some interesting circumstances and observations to those who take the time to notice. I’ve found myself using a different set of “I shoulda’s,” and “if only I’d have ...” than I used when I lived in Raleigh to explain some of the missed opportunities and nervous moments I’ve met up with here since taking up organic farming and mountain land development. The heavy rains we had last week coupled with the exceptionally warm weather drove home a couple of important points about good timing and dutiful action in this part of the country; “you best ought keep both right and ready.”

After a gentle winter with few snow hazards, it gets pretty easy to focus on the nice warming days just ahead and all the projects awaiting our winter-stifled hands and minds. We look out and see buds beginning to break and bluebirds on fences, somehow overlooking last fall’s leaves lying in the ditches or the untrimmed raspberry bushes hanging in the pathways like Medusa’s many snakes. Farm projects don’t end. Fruit trees need to be trimmed in winter, not when it’s convenient.

A few days before the rains began, conditions were perfect for starting the logging project on a small stand of white pines on our property that had become infested with the dreaded pine beetle. After much ado and days of diverted attention in preparation of the site and the stream crossing involved, the dozer rolled in and prepared the log staging area for the stacks of logs soon coming from the forested hillside. Everything was going pretty well for the first two days, and the logs were piling up when the rains began to fall, shutting down the progress until drier conditions. It’s been 10 days since the shut down, and it’s still raining every other day. So much for timing.

I was glad when the rains fell hard that we had taken the time early on to properly install brush filters, silt fence, water breaks and other water/erosion control measures which are doing their job to keep silt out of the ditches and creeks. The log yard isn’t filling up, but at least the creeks aren’t either. We got part of the mountain timing right. With that project on hold, I took some time and did a “pipe check” after a particularly hard downpour of the 20 or so culverts that cross under our community road system to make sure they were clear and flowing properly. Remember those leaves laying in the ditch since last fall? One pipe was plugged about a foot deep with leaves and dirt, allowing a only a trickle to pass through its 16-inch inlet; another one took a good bit of digging just to find it. If you’ve never dug out plugged culverts in the rain, then you’re missing out on an informative part of mountain life. The same steep slopes and abundant rainfall that make this region so lush and beautiful also create a lot of maintenance work on roads and ditches — if you plan to keep them. A hard rain on a poorly built or unmaintained road can turn your driveway into the Grand Canyon in the blink of an eye.

We spent a ton of extra time and money building our road system to stand up to harsh weather and heavy rainfall while minimizing runoff and erosion, and here I stood with plugged pipes surrounded by mud and wet leaves because I hadn’t cleaned the ditches at the right time. About that time my friend pulled up and I whined to him about buried culverts and bad timing. He smiled a sly smile and said, “At least you still have roads. One of your neighbor’s roads is spread across the intersection. I believe it rained pretty hard.”

“Well, maybe his timing isn’t very good,” I muttered. I finished my muck-moving, and with that task completed we headed over to the garden for a look around the raised beds. We walked up and down a few paths when I came to one I had edged a couple of months ago, piling the sod clumps I cut from the perimeter onto the bed for winter breakdown and protection of the bulbs and roots beneath.

The heat of the past week had caused new growth to jump from the beds, early weeds heralding spring and the start of another gardening season.

“We’ve got to get started weeding already if we’re not going to get caught late like last year. We battled those things all season for being late,” I commented.

I bent down to pull a few rogue plants and squish around in the wet March dirt when I saw a lily shoot sticking through the grassy clods, then another, and another. The bed, now covered in soggy clumps, didn’t even get cleaned up during the busy fall season. It screamed of tardiness. I looked over toward my friend standing over a weedy strawberry bed.

“I take that back, we’re late again. Maybe we need to work on our timing.”

(John Beckman is a building contractor, organic farmer and operations manager at Unahwi Ridge Community in Jackson County. He can be reached at www.unahwiridge.com)