[Landline] Self-Pollinating
1. A TORTOISE MOVES IN
Stephanie says: "Not the gorgeous shot we typically aim for, but wildlife photography is tough folks! What's important here: We are welcoming our first desert tortoise to the food oasis at Sunever Farms. She's built her burrow in a swale (it's part swale and part 'hugelkultur' planting bed) right up against a newly planted Mexican Elderberry (Sambucus mexicana). A good omen!"
A bit more info: We made the swale by piling horizontally branches and trunks from the dead asian pear trees that were on the property, then mounding with sand and dirt, forming a trench and a swale at the same time. The dead trees provide undergirding and also retain moisture, which (as you can see in here) helps new plants, whose root growth makes the swale stronger and better able to withstand flooding. And now it looks like those old branches and trunks are acting the same way as creosote tree roots do — providing a space where a burrow can be safely dug by a wild animal. So awesome.
2. RADIO FREE ERIK DAVIS
I was very psyched indeed to be author Erik Davis's guest last month on his long-running livestreamed internet radio show, "Expanding Mind" on http://prn.fm . The show was archived so you can listen at your convenience—it's an hour long so get ready. Erik was a contributing writer and columnist ("The Analog Life") for Arthur Magazine in addition to all the great work he's done through the years. Erik described our conversation this way: "Joshua Tree homesteader and former Arthur editor Jay Babcock talks about turkey vultures, Vipassana, wildlife stewardship, and the communities of purpose he has discovered in the desert." You can stream or download the show here.
3. THE DANCE
In the radio show conversation, Erik quoted from a piece I wrote for the first issue of Ken Layne's great little magazine, Desert Oracle (Spring 2015). Following is the complete text of that piece; it's a bit dated but might of use/amusement...
Letter From North Joshua Tree
"SELF-POLLINATING"
November 11, 2014
I’m composing this missive from beneath our desert ash tree. Watering the Joshua tree, watching the male finches zip about, running Steve Gunn’s Way Out Weather on the house hi-fi out the open windows. That I’m outdoors mid-morning in November means that the warm autumn is continuing: little to no wind, daytime temperatures cycling 10 degrees north and south of 80F, blue skies and clear nights.
But yeah, I’m watering a 16-foot Joshua tree in November because there hasn’t been much rain here since Spring. That was enough to give us our our first wildflower season in years, albeit a mild one. Mildflowers. And grass, and more plants, which meant for everyone to feed on. The ants seemed to mobilize first and widest — black and reds alike, constructing chains of mounds wherever there was sand. Then during the summer months the ant-devourers were out en masse — we saw the greatest variety and quantity of our lizard friends since Stephanie and I set up housekeeping here (as my grandfather would say) five years ago: Desert Horneds, Desert Banded Geckos (!), Western Whiptails. All their real names, your honor. And the insects! I will also call them by their secular names: Thistledown Velvet Ants, Pallid Grasshoppers, Giant Redheaded Centipedes, Tarantula Hawk Wasps — the latter having larvae-nesting habits so hideous they may singlehandedly prove the case for the universe being fundamentally evil in the antinatalist sense.
Then there were the Giant Hairy Scorpions (pictured here): six-inch-long land lobsters with a mildly venomous sting, who were so plentiful in our outdoor raised bed garlic patch that I hand-relocated them by the dozen to an undisclosed location twice. (Amazingly, these ‘insects’ can live for 25 years. Can your dog?) More bats and butterflies (especially around the compost/manure operation) too. Friends down near Aberdeen Road saw a family of Ringtail cats several nights in a row in October.
And this past weekend, one of the migratory flocks of turkey vultures that we see here twice yearly roosted overnight in our neighbor Old Joe’s giant honey mesquite tree, 250 yards from our house, and in Miguel and Marta’s grove up the road. In the morning they sat on fence posts and at the trees’ apexes, with their three-foot wings extended, motionless for minutes on end sunning themselves, warming up for the day’s flight. “They look like wet umbrellas,” said a friend. Then they were off, in that funnel/cyclone formation they travel in.
Joe, our 78-year-old neighbor to the west: for about a month this summer it looked like he was going to move back to Oklahoma to live with extended family there. Even put his house on the market with a local realtor. The FOR SALE sign went up and came down in less than 24 hours. Joe had second, final thoughts and is staying put. “Too late to change now,” he says.
All of this heroic life, but almost no rain, not even during this year's seven-week "monsoon season.” It’s years — actually: decades? — like this when you need to water the Joshua trees very carefully, so the roots aren’t overwhelmed. (By the way: Stephanie recently found what just might be the definitive text on the subject— The Joshua Tree by Gloria Hine Gossard, Yellow Rose Publications, 1992.) See, it’s easy to get back to the land when there’s already a few people there. They show you how to live wisely in the place where you are — what trees can stand greywater, why you should get a swamp cooler instead of a standard A/C, what month you need to wrap the water pipes, how you need to let the coyotes have a place to get water so they don’t chew your overground irrigation lines. We neglected the coyotes and now we have a couple water fountains flowing near our Jujube tree orchard every time we turn the water on at our farm.
The farm! Well, it’s a farm-to-be. We bought a 20-acre parcel at a county tax auction about a year ago for very little cash: scraped dirt for dirt-cheap. The previous owner had abandoned the property after clearing all plant life from 13 acres of pristine creosote forest and planting 900-plus Asian Pear fruit trees on a grid, which had since all died. At least that’s what we thought. Turned out this year that they didn’t all die, and they weren’t all Asian Pears. A dozen of them were Jujube trees, and they’d not just survived but were leafing and fruiting. Our friend Rudyard of Surprise Valley had guessed their identity correctly.
In the spring, we visited jujube guru Roger Meyer to learn the lore firsthand of this fabulous fruit, a staple of Chinese medicine and an official superfood that fruits forever, loves sand, prunes itself, and has no known serious pests or diseases. In other words: perfect for newcomers like us, and the only wise move by the previous owners.
What will we do with the rest of the 20 acres? I’ll just say that a few of the Asian Pears survived, Stephanie has been propagating natives like a madwoman, we’re newly inspired by the Findhorn Garden in Scotland, and we are determined to slowly, patiently bring this piece of land back to rich life, even if the struggle against rapacious industrial civilization is bound to fail. Because that’s the Real Work. As Gary Snyder put it so directly back in the ‘70s: “To take the struggle on without the least hope of doing any good. To check the destruction of the interesting and necessary diversity of life on the planet, so that the dance can go on a little better for a little longer.”
The fifth issue of the Desert Oracle is available now. Subscribe: Desert Oracle
More soon,
Jay
Joshua Tree, California
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Note: Landline is by me, Jay Babcock, former editor and co-founder of Arthur Magazine. If you were subscribed to the old Arthur Magazine email bulletin, you have been added to this list, as Landline is essentially a continuation of that bulletin and I thought anyone who liked that stuff had a good chance of finding this stuff of interest as well. What is this stuff? Ideas and nudges, hopefully forming a small bailiwick outside the unceasing current of cruddiness — irregular epistles intended for friends, colleagues, Arthur heads, pastoral people, plant people, rural country people, dharma people, herbalists, gardeners, wild people and other curious sweetfolk. I hope Landline will be of use to you.