Pigs, Bees, and Garden are all doing great... Thought I might doing something a little different and stand on my soapbox this month.
on the right the field that was burned 3 months a go
next to a field (the left) that has not been touched for 4 years
(it's more noticeable if you look at the full sized picture)
What jumps out at me is the number of ragweed, This picture was taken at the beginning of the summer and now the field has gone through a series of changes mostly with large numbers of one plant species or another seeming to take hold. The left side suggests the direction that the field would go without intervention, sapling starting to crowd out the blueberries and under shrubs, the mean hight of the plant life around 2ft. Within another 5 years the right field would be filled with saplings, and the edges would have been moved in, and overall be as grown in as the left. The point is that nature tends to abhor a vacuum. A lot of weeds and invasive species, while interfering with human goals, also seem to be trying to recover bare, disturbed land or filling in empty niches (there are notable exceptions to this where a plant or animal is carving its own new niche, but throwing poison in the waterways hardly seems an acceptable option and is another story altogether). I like to think of flora as a battery. If you start by imagining a cleared to the ground lot, bare earth, and picture how it would look time lapse 20, 60, and 100 years from now. I see small weedy plants giving way to bushes and shrub giving way to sapling to larger trees that soak up the light changing the diversity of the species on the ground. Each new round of plant and companion insect and animal life adding to the life, and potential for life, inherent in the earth. 100 years later we would hope to find a forest with a 60ft canopy using every ray of sunlight available to it.
In the garden I've planted clusters of vegetable, both to try shade out the weeds and to take every advantage of the sunlight that I have, in crude imitation of shading out, natural competition. It worked better for some vegetables than others. My carrots have so far been the best working example, I allowed them to self-thin and the carrot patch has been weed/work free, I believe that what I suffer in individual size of the carrots or total yield, I will more than make up for in the ratio of effort expanded to yield. Not a method for those perfectionist gardeners who demand neat rows, but it works for me.
This summer has been my first real experience with gardening and with horticulture in general, but has only served to reaffirm my own observations and those of some pretty wise people before me. The more that people try to improve on, take short cuts to, or dissect the natural world; the more humanity just ends up fucking it up.
