Saturday, July 28, 2012

A sea of mown hay

I mow the fields here chiefly to keep them in hay rather than let them grow up to woods. Most years I spread the hay as a mulch and poor man's fertilizer below the branches of the apple trees, out around the drip line. Mowing here is difficult on account of the rough and hilly terrain, and the large rocks in the fields. A four-wheel tractor would tip over, but a two-wheel, walk-behind tractor is relatively stable and, with a sickle bar attached, does the job, although it is jarring and tiring. 


In some years when I want more hay I mow twice: once in mid-June, and once in late August or early September. Lately I've been mowing once, in August. It's best to do this on a relatively mild day, but one does it when one can; and so over the next few weeks I will mow when I get the chance. I started today on the field in back of the house. Although it was relatively mild, in the high 70s, it was also very humid, and by the end of it I had perspired through my t-shirt and my long-sleeved shirt over it. (Long pants and long sleeves prevent the hay from rubbing the skin and irritating it, which is much more uncomfortable than sweating through the shirts.) One of my colleagues at Brown remarked to me this spring that she imagined I never sweat. I may be cool in the classroom, but not mowing in the fields.


The sea of mown hay, July 28, 2012
The grass was up to my waist in most spots, and up to my eyeballs in a few, on account of the spring and early summer rains; but the recent dry spell, coupled with the natural tendency of the grass to dry out, made much of the grass into straw for the mowing. If it doesn't rain tomorrow I will do more. The photograph I took today shows what it's like to be in the midst of the sea of mown hay. And after the mowing comes the raking into wind rows, and then into stacks, and then the spreading around the drip lines of the apple trees. 

Thursday, July 26, 2012

A late July walk


The recent hot, humid weather has caused me to take a different route on my walks for the past couple of weeks. Besides, I had some visitors last week filming me as an expert for a documentary they were shooting, and then earlier this week I visited some friends in Eastport and Indian Township. But today, having re-grouped some, I went back on my old route through the woods. Birds were singing as they had for the last couple of months; I heard the black-throated green warbler, the white-throated sparrow, and the hermit thrush. Deer flies and mosquitos were flying around making it a bit unpleasant. A small tree had fallen across the path. I pulled it back into the woods on the right side.

Last year I remarked on the heal all self-heal plant that is common along this walk. It has been in bloom for at least six weeks now, and the flowers are in a diminished mode at present. I photographed a little patch, and then a closeup of one of them, from the top. A photograph of the plant in more abundant bloom is in my blog entry for June 8, 2010. 

Heal all is a remarkable medicinal herb, wild-growing throughout temperate climates in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. It is antibacterial and can be used in a poultice on a wound, or as a tea for internal infections such as gingivitis. It shows promise in treatment of AIDS and allergies. The whole plant may be used. It may also be eaten in salads, raw.

The skunk cabbages at this time of the year remain large-leaved, with some leaves as much as two feet in length; but the insects have eaten and damaged parts of the leaves. The skunk cabbage grove now shows the other plants, especially grasses, that have grown in while the rains have slowed down and the swampy area has become much drier. 

Jack-in-the-pulpit is widespread along the path. Not all grew large or well enough to form seed pods, but this one did; this pod is still in the green stage and in a month or so will turn red. A red pod from an earlier plant is barely visible at the upper left in the photo.

Monday, July 2, 2012

Heat wave? What heat wave?


The massive thunderstorms coupled with the heat wave that has struck the mid-Atlantic coast and the Midwest return me to an old theme of this blog: how unprepared for disaster the modern way of life has rendered the so-called developed world. There is irony but no comfort in realizing that one hundred years ago rural Americans were not so dependent on electric power for heat, light, and the many electric appliances that keep our food cold, keep us from sweltering in the heat, cook our food, and so forth. Those who were hell-bent on development and modernization promised, along with the electricity with which we would power our lives, prosperity from a rising tide of unlimited growth that would lift all boats--improve everyone's living standard. But, as Enrique Leff pointed out recently (please see my other blog, on Music and Sustainability, at http:sustainablemusic.blogspot.com), the environment, nebulous as the concept is, resists rationality; and it resists our attempts to control it.

I have written here earlier of how the ice storm of January, 1998 knocked out the power to rural Maine. Many were without power during that period for a week or even longer; we lost ours for three days. If you have no other source of heat for your dwelling than something dependent on electricity--and that means not only direct electric heat but also oil and natural gas heat dependent on electric motors and thermostats (which covers most of the developed world)--when the outside temperature goes below freezing you are in peril. In rural New England one hundred years ago folks heated chiefly with wood in stoves and fireplaces, and some with coal and kerosene not dependent on electricity. Today the wise rural New Englander in an older dwelling maintains a wood stove capable of keeping the house above freezing should the power go out, along with a supply of wood, even if one heats with oil or gas most of the time; and in a newer dwelling passive solar is the wisest choice. Others keep electricity generators at the ready, though these are rather expensive to install properly. 

This summer, though, the complaints from my friends and acquaintances in the mid-Atlantic states emphasize how uncomfortable it is with the temperature near 100 degrees and no air conditioning. One government official, angry at the power companies' inability to restore electricity quickly, declared that the length of time it was taking was "unacceptable," as if electric power somehow were the natural order of things. That government official might have wondered how Thomas Jefferson must have fared at Monticello without air conditioning, or how Abraham Lincoln could have managed to stay in the White House during a heat wave. Possibly that official's ancestors owned slaves during the antebellum period. Imagine a slave coming up to one of that official's ancestors cooling off with a mint julep on the veranda, and saying, "Master, it is too warm, whether my family is chopping cotton in the hot sun or sweltering in the cramped and stuffy slave hut. We find these conditions unacceptable." Fat chance.

Another one of my acquaintances writes, "Alas, I am without power and my house is sweltering. It is hard to find a quiet place to communicate and the libraries are closed and the cooling centers are jammed… We are in quite a disaster down here in [Maryland]." I would like to believe that someone who writes "Alas…" would have backup heat in winter, and be aware of the irony of the current situation; but irony is, as I say, no comfort. Given the effects of global warming, on which this and other increasing weather-related disasters such as the High Park, Waldo Canyon and other wildfires in the West are blamed, we can only expect situations like these to occur more frequently. NPR's Morning Edition excerpted an interview with a climate change expert who affirmed that although global warming is the cause, it is impossible to predict exactly when and where these events will take place--only that they will do so more often, and with more severity (please see my blog entry on complex systems for July 27, 2011, at http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com).

Of course, it gets quite warm at times here in East Penobscot Bay, but very seldom does the temperature go above the 80s. For the past three days, while the temperatures in the Atlantic Coast and Midwest have ranged around 100 degrees, plus or minus five, and in southern New England it's been in the 90s, the high here was 82. But that, too, may be changing. Certainly there's been an increase in the number of violent storms here, summer and winter. As Yogi Berra once said, "Boys, the future is all ahead of us."