Dry, Dusty, and Crunchy Land

Texas Garter Snake

Last weekend I invited a coworker and her son to visit Die Weide as they've been reading my blog and looking to purchase their own piece of Texas paradise. While walking the back trail, her son, Wes, spotted this snake, subsequently identified as a Texas Garter Snake. He, at eight years old, had no fear of snakes and wanted to pick it up. We didn't let him, but he did touch it. It was more than 2 ft long.

Funny thing about that is in the several years we've owned Die Gruene Weide, we've only seen three snakes, and I never spotted one. Inge spotted a corn snake in the copse of trees near Picnic Pecan, and she spotted the water moccasin in the creek below the pond. (During one of the few times the pond held water.) And now a complete stranger to the land spots the garter snake. I guess I'm just snake blind.

This weekend I went out to water the orchard, feed and water Herbie,  the donkey, and move the trail cam elsewhere. I had placed the trail cam in the orchard to see what was eating our peach trees and found out it wasn't Herbie as I suspected, it was a doe and her fawns that decimated our orchard. The deer denuded two of the six peach trees and seriously damaged a plum tree. In the garden the asparagus  had been browsed down to stubby stalks - all the former delicate green and lush asparagus vegetation gone! Hopefully they grew enough through the summer to regenerate next spring.

The one sad thing I found today was that the land was very dry, dusty, and crunchy. This years long drought is taking a toll on the land and it doesn't take long for the Blackland Prarie to exhibit the cracks and movement of the predominately clay soil drying up. The vegetation withers, curls, and browns and crunches underfoot. When the land looks like this I have much less enthusiasm to write because I am so saddened to see how unhealthy it looks in drought conditions.

When the land looks like this I dream of living in a place like Washington State, or Oregon, or Kentucky, or North Carolina. Some place where the land looks lush and green from spring to fall and a garden grows with only modest additional watering requirements. I could, even now, transfer to North Carolina with my job, but we've put so much work into Die Weide, that it would be a shame to loose out on the orchard of 11 trees we planted and the garden and so on. So I dream of green while suffering and lamenting over the drought that I seriously worry may be a persistent and permanent new feature as a result of global warming. I would be seriously sad if this dry summer condition becomes the forevermore norm because from a gardening perspective, there's not much productive that comes from land in this desiccated condition.