View from the North 40: A soft-fleshed human in an inhospitable land

Weed, bug and heat season is not the time to be made of soft, fleshy parts — and, yet, here I am. Again.

There’s this one part of spring that I really look forward to each year. Not that there’s anything wrong with spring as a whole. It’s no autumn, and, as a whole, it beats the pants off of summer and winter, but there’s that sweet spot of spring when everything has turned green and it makes my eyes sigh.

That sweet spot isn’t only about everything being green — it’s pretty and all with the shiny new leaves and the perfect carpet of green — but the real attraction is that from a distance you can’t tell which parts of the green carpet are lovely pasture greens for grazing and which ones are weeds that exist to annoy me at best and hurt me if they have the tools.

During the sweet spot you don’t even have to squint to blur the edges a bit. Everything looks like healthy, lovely greenness for as far as the eye can see. And you can stand there forever, marveling in the beauty without once involuntarily donating blood to help feed a family of a bajillion pests or acting as your own swamp cooler pumping out gallons of bodily moisture as sweat.

Sometimes the sweet spot lasts as much as a month. And that’s a blessed long time to allow myself to be delusional about the inevitable weeds.

This year, with the cool and dry spring, we had some green, but most of that turned out to be cheatgrass, which was already heading out before the good moisture got here. So when the sweet spot of greenness finally hit, I had to look far into the distance not to be distracted by the nasty, pokey seeds-to-be in some extraordinary patches of cheatgrass.

I did not sigh at the greenness of my pasture.

I did get to see the sweet spot green stretch across the foothills of the Bear Paw Mountains – just in time. The next day the temp rose to the 91 and the next two days higher than 100, and that three-day period abruptly ended the sweet spot.

The fragile late grasses curled up and died, the bigger grasses stopped growing and popped their seed heads out of the boot like they were throwing a life preserver to the future of their species. Tree leaves got that bitter, disappointed look that comes with having maturity forced upon you. All the cheatgrass fully ripened to a crispy brown doneness, the seeds drooping on the stems belying their killer instincts to latch onto my socks and immediately start drilling into my ankles.

But who am I kidding, all the weeds now either stand as the only lush green plants in the pasture conjuring the last moisture from the hot dry soil, or they matured into pasture piranhas. Along with the cheatgrass I have two species of spear grass that live up to their name, foxtail that isn’t as pretty as it sounds, and a new one called squirreltail that isn’t officially noxious, except to me. And I could walk you straight to examples of about a dozen other non-feed grasses and grass-like plants that aren’t pokey, but they are a waste of soil.

The mustard has gone to seed already, too late to save the pasture from it self-cultivating. The curly cup gumweed is ripe for pulling, which would kill it off, but all the plants are ready. Right. Now. Except the great burr-makers – burdock and wild licorice – are coming on, and so is the pigweed and the broad leaf weed that I can’t remember the name of, along with at least four species of low-growing something or others and the tall pokey-leaf one with the delicate yellow flowers.

All of them need to be taken care of. Right. Now.

There’s also three species of thistle, including Russian thistle, aka tumble weed. That’s a gift that keeps on giving to the whole neighborhood. You’re welcome.

Oh, and can’t forget that I need to mow because another heat wave is coming and I don’t want to be sitting in the middle of a knee-high tinderbox. And I need to spray that 5-foot wide stretch of weeds outside the front fence line where the Department of Transportation let a cable company dig a 21-mile long line between towns but didn’t require the company to reseed the disturbed soil. It’s not like I had anything else to do.

That’s sarcasm — a thick, steaming layer of it.

As I stand outside contemplating all the weed wrangling left to do on my 60 acres, I try to remind myself how far this place has come in the last 10 years, of the dozens of good feed plant varieties and the wild flowers. Mostly, though, I wonder what this particular piece of land looked like in 1886 before James J. Hill mined out the giant hill that was once up to 75 feet higher than my head.

Great Northern Railway left without cleaning up. Gravel miners have come in again and again and again and down to us. We mined it, too.

I think I would be inhospitable, too, I would grow prickly things to keep the humans away, and non-feed things to keep the animals off until I could generate better topsoils. Give myself time, maybe a decade or a 20, to get over the last century of disturbance.

Maybe the weeds and pokeys are just Earth’s sarcasm and crass humor. I get that.

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I don’t even want to talk about all the grasshoppers, mosquitoes, gnats, moths and spiders or the new resident skunk and gopher at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .