The Wind Arose and Swept the Snow – Our Place in the Landscape

We occupy a rather unique geography here at American Nacre that has a large effect on how the elements treat us. Here is an aerial photograph that shows the farm last May as seen from an altitude of about 17,000 feet. Our 40 acres is the small square of land surrounding the pushpin – you can see the 1000 feet of lane running up the middle, paralleling Kincaid Creek. You can see all the dark green of wooded creeks running to the southeast, falling steeply off the bluff onto the Mississippi River floodplain. To the northwest, another series of creeks drains more gently into the Cedar River, another of Iowa's many large rivers, but which despite its nearness at this point doesn't have its confluence with the Mississippi for another fifty miles downstream. The grey-tan fields in between these two major drainages are an edge of a plateau scraped flat during the last ice age, and all these rivers and creeks were formed after the glaciers receded.

The upshot of all this is that American Nacre sits just below the plateau, enough that winter winds from the west and northwest tend to pass over much of the farm, rather than blowing across it. You can use the live map link to fly around the farm and see how steeply the land falls into the drainages.

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Which leads to the next set of photographs.

In the woods and the creek valley, the snow has fallen softly and evenly in relatively calm air. Snow several inches deep balances even on very slender branches. But along the west fence line it's a different matter. The neighbors' soybean and hay fields are swept by the wind, which sculpts the snow into beautiful drifts as it is released in the vortices produced by the fences and brush and terraces that separate our land from theirs.

Harvest sounds: grain trucks, grain dryers, and combines

Catching Up

The drought broke here, after a fashion, on August 4 when during a large outdoor party in the afternoon we got a terrific thunderstorm and blow that dropped 1.5" of rain. Two hours later, though, one would never have known it had rained – there was no runoff nor even puddles. Since then we've had a couple storms that left about 0.7" each, and a couple at 0.1". None of this has restored the deficit and there's been no runoff so the pond continues to dry up and in the surrounding countryside the corn continues to die. Still, the grass has greened-up and everything looks a lot better. Temperatures moderated over the past couple weeks, 80s and 90s, and this makes for easier working outdoors.

In Seattleland, I always had the impression of the sky, and weather, being quite close to the ground. The skies here in Iowa are big, expansive, and layered into the stratosphere. On several recent days the cloud cover has primarily been composed of condensation trails from aircraft crisscrossing this piece of flyover country.

Today I met the farmer on the other side of this fence. He'd was looking for a four-year-old, 2500 pound bull that had gone missing, and I had to tell him I'd not seen it. It's a bit of a mystery because his pastures are well-fenced, but he told me that, without the addition of electric wire, a bull of that size can jump five strands of barbed wire. I rather hope I don't find the big thing.

The previous owners installed chain-link fencing around the house, presumably to contain their small children, and one of the first things Alan & Donna did when they arrived was to take down the mesh, but the posts were set in concrete – not just the corners but every one! – and proved quite difficult to remove. Alan and I gave it another go last weekend, using a technique derived from a 1909 book, Handy Farm Devices and How to Make Them. We had a tractor instead of a team of horses, but the principles were the same. Our first attempts failed, but after digging away the turf that had covered the top of the concrete bases, creating little moats, and soaking these for a while – success!

Now the collection of posts is stacked in our stockpiles area, awaiting repurposing. Perhaps we'll cut off the pipes above the concrete and make giant wind chimes in the woods.

On a recent evening the clouds boiled up then, as has usually been the case, parted and went around without producing rain. But such magnificent tableaux! As my hero Jack Vance might put it, allegories of battles between good and evil...

The rain caused a lot of the tomato crop to split on the vine, and these fruits require a lot of culling and trimming before we can use them, but the dehydration project continues and the next step will be to pack them in oil and herbs. There are still a lot more on the vines, and sauce to be made and preserved.

Donna harvested Concords from one of the grapevines and made jelly. A rip-roaring success for her first attempt at this – excellent color, consistency, and flavor.

Not the Day We Planned

The heat and drought continue and it cooled only to 73 degrees last night, but was so humid that even that warm temperature was below the dewpoint. At dawn the thermoclines produced a couple distinct bands of fog overhead, which quickly burned off into another hot, clear, and windless day. Alan and I were out of the house by eight o'clock, he to the shop to make some repairs and me to the gardens to continue my holding action against the awful purslane.

Hoes in hand, I rounded the corner of the machine shed and encountered a cow and two calves grazing in the yard, the third time this obstreperous creature and its young had breached the north fence from the neighbor's pasture. The grass is always greener...

photo credit: Rex

Iowa law uses a right-hand rule to describe the shared responsibility for fence maintenance between neighboring properties. You stand at the center along a shared boundary, looking across into your neighbor's land, and the half of the fence to your right is yours to maintain. Our half of this fence is decrepit, repairs upon repairs of old barbed and welded wire fencing, with a motley collection of mostly rotted posts. The neighbor had installed some electric fencing as a stop-gap, and we'd made some very cursory repairs, but these cows just broke through again in the same place (they're smarter than you might think), and now there were really no more half-measures to be taken.

The breach:

There were lots of things we'd rather have done today, but we built fence. The nearest braced posts required we put in a 150-foot section, using 78-inch T-posts at 12-foot spacing, and five courses of barbed wire spaced nine inches apart. Barbed wire is nasty stuff. A quarter-mile of it on a reel is very heavy. It has to be tensioned with chains and come-alongs, and we were working in and around the several previous versions of the fence and the current (ha!) electric fence. We each got a pretty good jolt along the way, and that is a damned uncomfortable experience. I rent my clothing, and I rent my flesh but, by god, we got it done.

We began at this post made of "hedge" or Osage orange, and worked our way east.

The fenceline drops into a gully at the other end and, further complicating matters, at this point the electric fence makes a 90-degree turn into the neighbor's land. Our barbed wire had to fit through it all without shorting. Here we used plastic bottles as insulators to keep the wires apart while we strung and tensioned. The sheet metal behind the trees is the vane from an old windmill, apparently placed to stabilize the slope, which here is falling from upper right to lower left.

The neighbor, who's been caring for his family farm since he was eighteen, forty years ago, gave us high marks for the finished work, so I think we did all right.

And now I'm very tired and it's time to go to bed.