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Teeter Creek Farm: the end of summer
At the Teeter Creek Herb Farm we are winding up another gardening year, and soon it will be the time for digging roots. It was a year of contrasts. We have been in a tremendous drought. A booger of a high pressure system has been sitting over us for over a year. I just learned today that most of Texas has been suffering a worse drought than occurred during the dust bowl days. We in the southern Ozarks must be in the same pattern as front after front has moved around us.
This last spring was the driest in memory. It was eerie as the sky would cloud up and spit a few drops. It forgot how to rain. A few well-timed rains in June restored our hopes that it was possible for water to come from the sky, and saved many plants from an early demise. As it was, many of the wild plants were stunted and went to seed early. Many things bloomed way ahead of time.
Paradoxically, we had one of our best gardens ever, and were able to harvest many fine herbs. I imagine it was due to the early mild weather, and our best efforts to water herbs that normally would require no water at all. Now it has turned off drier than ever as we’ve hit a week of 100 degree weather with no relief in sight.
The water table has dropped dramatically. We have had to tap into a different spring as a water source. Old Mrs. Gott, who lived through 3 years of drought at this old homeplace in the early 1950’s, assured us that the little but mighty spring tucked away back in a hollow across Teeter Creek was their only source of drinking water, and sure enough the everflowing spring behind our home has dried up for the first time in 50 years.
So the good news is that the wild plants have remarkable survival skills, and that we have had a good enough harvest to provide another year of the high quality herbs we are known for. We’ll have to get out extra early to harvest herbs like Black Cohosh which are normally the first to dissappear in the fall. Otherwise patches of such herbs have to be marked so that the roots can still be dug. Beyond that, send us some good thoughts for rain. Is global warming setting a pattern for us here we’d rather do without?
The Ozarks has experienced many climate changes in the past that account for much of the great diversity of plants to be found here. Right on our farm there co-exist rare plants in a wet, cool fen area that have been here since the last ice age, with plants growing on the upper dry glades that are normally found in southwestern deserts. These were thought to have found their way to the Ozarks during an extended xeric, or dry period thought to have occurred nearly 5000 years ago.
So are we in a 5000 or a fifty year cycle? Or has man screwed it all up beyond any possible theorizing? I believe that the earth is a much more mysterious place than anyone can realize. We can’t truly predict the weather for one day, much less a millenium. The futility of placing man-made conceptions on the workings of the earth was brought home to me when I went off into the woods on the new millenium. Quite uneventful to the ponderous old trees. Nor do I believe that we can estimate the earth’s capacity to heal and adapt. In the meantime we pray humbly and look to the sky for the water of life.
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