Missouri Falling

        Well, time is certainly flying here! It seems like just yesterday that I took the photo to the right, remarking to Mike, "hey, the oak tree next to our tent is beginning to change color! Look at the lower limb, see the little bit of red tinging the leaves?" It has been almost a month since that first color siting and this morning I noted bleakly that what few leaves that were left on the trees around us were a boring brown. Color swept through and left town in a hurry.
      Still, it has been an interesting month. Adjusting to the cold snap that hit a few weeks ago was a challenge. One chilly morning we woke to find the world outside our tent flap a white-frosted wonderland. It is one thing to marvel at the frost from the toasty comfort of your home window and quite another to have to heat up your morning tea water in it. First step- break ice up in water pitcher. Second step, fumble around in gloves to get paper and twigs amassed enough to successfully light fire. Third- huddle shivering around little stove, eeking out the scant warmth it provides for the ten minutes of burn time it takes to heat water. And so on. But then, weirdly, a week later we were out in tank tops and shorts for a late warm-weather blast, basking in the sun. There is a saying in Missouri, "if you don't like the weather, wait a minute or two". Very true.

    The other shift in weather that has been defining the contour of our days is the increase in rain. Cold and warm fronts have been battling it out in huge thunder and lightning storms. We have gone from a severe drought to a severe deluge of water. We had our Belgian friend Geoffrey staying with us during one of the worst storms which struck around 4 am. We tried to sleep through it in our rather leaky tent despite the streams of water aiming themselves directly at our bed. Geoffrey apparently was also getting soaked in his tent and came seeking refuge in ours. He laughed and made an about-face when he saw how much wetter it was in ours... after 7 layers of blankets got soaked through, we started catching the water streams in trays and buckets. I can only hope one day we look back and laugh at these moments. Mike has since taken initiative to reinforce our tenting situation with a huge heavy silver tarp that we got at an auction. Our tent now looks like some futuristic metal dome-hovel. Oh well for aesthetics! We are now the eyesore in the otherwise bleak landscape.

      But the silver lining about all the rain is that our pond is really filling! We probably have about a foot of water so far, and little green sprouts shooting up through the straw surrounding the dam wall. (The trees in the pond bottom in the photo above are for future fish-nursery habitat). We took some time and care to gather native grass seed from around our land and our neighbor's, the Crawford's, land nearby. Richard Crawford is a specialist in prairie restoration and taught us how to harvest and identify native grasses vs. introduced grasses (ie- Indian Grass good, Fescue bad...) It is amazing how many wildflowers and grasses there are all around us, the variety of which I had formerly lumped together in my mind as "grassy stuff" instead of Little Bluestem, Mountain Mint, Goldenrod, Greyheaded Coneflower, etc. It occurs to me that this year on the land has been about learning the landscape around us, which I suspect will be an ongoing education. Mike has been furthering our knowledge by reading up on wild-foraging and we have been astounded by how much of our landscape is actually edible. He has also been mushroom-hunting up a storm, and almost every other day we have mushrooms with breakfast. So far he has found Chicken-of-the-Woods, Elm Oysters, Oysters, Wood-ears, Puff balls, and he has inoculated around 20 logs with 5 other species of edible mushroom spores which will fruit in another year. Yum!

     And otherwise, work on the land continues as best we can here... Digging swales, still processing wood and debarking logs, putting in a spillway ditch for the pond and carving spoons out of black walnut and cherry wood for our fundraiser thank-you gifts. We also have had new neighbors move in, a young family of four who have been long-time friends of Ethan and Sarah. They too are moving onto new land without existing structures and will be embarking on a homestead-creating adventure along with us. We also have gotten to meet other local neighbors, folks who have dropped off a bucket of turnips, offered us squirrel meat (hmmm...), given us tree seed and offered advice and history of the area and our land. We learned our parcel used to be called "happy Jack's place" after the fellow who used to own it a few decades back, who was, apparently, a happy guy! Well here are a few more shots of the fleeting fall beauty over at happy Jack's place. With a few more weeks still to go, send us some warm wishes :)

A storm blowing over at sunset