Destroyer and Pie

I borrowed a mower from Turnip Rock Farm. A brush hog to be exact, a large deck mower that not so much has blades as it does baseball bats that flail about and whack down all in it’s path. The farm has been a little out of control, and both my mowers will be meeting their maker at the scrap yard soon. In the meanwhile, Turnip Rock was kind enough to loan theirs out for the week.

I made my rounds on the farm with it, working down a few cover crops that needed a little management, around all the plots, and around the apple trees where we have built up a healthy population of thistle over the years.

It’s these thistle areas that made me feel guilty. In those areas, it wasn’t just thistle. It was all copious other plants that pollinators love.

If I had my druthers, I would stay on top of keeping things mowed around the fields. That would keep them in a nice state of lawn, something that doesn’t entice it’s own biosphere. But, other things take priority for better or worse. And when you don’t stay on top of it, all manner of plant make their home, some desirable, and some, but human standards, not. And among all these plants are attracted the insects, and a few small mammals; some desirable, and some by human standards, not.

The guilt comes with the wholesale destruction that comes with whacking these areas down, with the bluntest of tools, disrupting the little microbiomes that have developed. “I have to do it,” I tell myself. “There is too much flowering thistle in there.’ And it’s true. Give that thistle another week, an it will be sending out and army of paratrooper seeds across the rest of the farm. Some in fact had gone reproductive. A little patch. I hit them with the mower and they exploded into a cloud of seeds, each with their own cottony parachute. These hit the radiator fan on the old IH 300 to create a Seed-nado(™). This is as scary as it sounds!! They whipped around in a cyclone to be sent off in any direction. This, to a farmer, is much more frightening than any other kind of tornado cross bred with a living creature.

I leave patches and strips of clover and milkweed where there isn’t thistle, to ease my guilt at destroying a pollinator paradise. I tell myself that there are other acres of paradise just outside the fence, which is true. Outside the fence, where I won’t mow, there are acres of goldenrod, milkweed, wildflowers, and probably…logically, some thistle. But the guilt stays.

“Next year I’ll keep it like a lawn” I tell myself. But then I remember that I’ve hardly mowed the actual lawn. The neighbor has done it 3 times now (Thanks Eugene!) when we’ve been away at market, a very kind (and helpful!!) gesture.

“I need to make them some pie this winter, to say thank you for mowing the lawn”, I think to myself as this mower eats lignin. “And, what a perfect excuse to make pie!!”

I think about pie, and the guilt of being a destroyer of worlds is slightly abated.

I’ll need to remember to clean off all the thistle seed, before returning the mower.