Up By the Road Ditch

Up by the road ditch in the front yard is a huge azalea bush.  In recent years, we've planted a baby's breath bush beside it for the white color to contrast against the hot pink.  It's in full bloom right now.  Actually, it's a good thing I got a photo of it when I did because we had a 2 inch downpour of rain today and most of the flowers are faded and torn up.  Glad I got a photo of the azalea in all its glory.  This azalea is one that we moved from my grandmother's house in Kinder.  I like planting things that have a story or some history.  That way when we walk around the yard, the sights spur fond memories.  The azalea is happy and is flourishing.  We planted in to anchor the western side of our yard.  It's doing a nice job.

Something that is not doing a nice job is the parish crew that is in charge of the ditches.  They pass by in a truck and spray Round-up in the ditch.  This variety of roundup kills everything buy Bermuda grass.  I can see why they do it.  It keeps the ditches clean so that water flows easily through it.  It also reduces the amount of time that they have to pass by with a tractor and cut the grass.

There's one problem, however.  They consistently over-shoot the ditch and spray Round-up 3 feet onto my property.  I'll show why that's a problem in a minute.  To combat this, I ordered some plastic corrugated signs and made some homemade placards to kindly and diplomatically request no spray on the ditch in front of our yard/pasture.  I have the similar message on the back side in the event they spray coming from the other direction.

Here's the issue and my grievance with the herbicide.  Roundup kills the grass down to the dirt.  This makes their job easier, BUT barren soil with no grass and no root structure holding it together creates an erosion problem.  You can see below how my topsoil on my property is eroding into the ditch.  Topsoil that should be growing grass now is slowly filling the ditch.  At some point the ditch will have so much of my soil in it that it won't properly drain.  Then they'll come with a track-hoe and a dump truck and scoop up my top soil and carry it away.

Erosion!

The downside of "No Spray" is that I'll have to take responsibility for keeping the ditch clean.  You can see in the photo below that I used a string trimmer to weed-eat the entire ditch.  It is not a terrible job to do this, but it's not a job I prefer doing.  The thing I thought about is the job will become a terrible job in August when the temperature approaches 100 and the humidity level approaches 100% as well!

I don't know.  We'll discuss this again in August.  It may make me re-think my position on "No Spray."

Sea Oats to the Rescue!

Hebrews 1  New American Standard Bible

God’s Final Word in His Son

1 God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, 2 in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom He also made the world. 3 And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, 4 having become so much better than the angels, to the extent that He has inherited a more excellent name than they.

While on vacation, we saw lots of sights.  I like the beach, but I like the mountains, too.  Tricia and I debated which type vacation we like the best, but never could make up our minds.  Being an agriculture person, I'm always looking at plants, trees and the like, wherever we go.  We hiked on the island and went into a Discovery Center for the Gulf Islands National Seashore.  The Seashore runs from Mississippi to Florida and the museum had a video we watched that was very interesting about the wildlife that inhabits this ecosystem.

One of the interesting things we learned was about "Sea Oats."  I took a photograph of them below.  Sea Oats were all over the sand dunes and birds would fly and roost on the stalk of the sea oats as they swayed lazily in the breeze.  If you look closely below, you can see why they got the name sea oats.  They have a head on them that looks similar to oats.  While what you see above the ground is interesting, it's what you can't see that makes this plant a real hero.

Sea oats, we learned, are a remarkable plant largely responsible for the islands' success in remaining despite hurricanes and punishing winds and water in this extreme weather environment.  Sea oats have an extensive root system that stretches out and holds the sand in place.  If the roots of the sea oats were not there, the sand dunes would be blown away and deposited elsewhere.  This is of vital importance to the mainland as the barrier islands serve as a "first line of defense" against the onslaught of bad weather, absorbing the first blows of hurricanes to protect the mainland.

The Bible verse I pasted above tells us that 'God upholds all things by the word of His Power.'  God holds all things together.  This is very encouraging to me.  As hurricane force winds metaphorically blow in our lives, we need an anchor - something to keep us from being blown away.  God is that rock, that strong tower, that Mighty Fortress that holds us together.

In a time of shifting sand, may we build our house upon the Rock!

Teaching the merits of Saving & Value

Benjamin and I have been talking about saving money and not going into debt.  I'm trying to give him some activities and examples that "hits him where he lives."  In other words, I'm trying to help him understand money from the eyes of a 12 year old boy.  I've got my work cut out for me!

Photo Credit

For example, I was trying to make the point how it is a good idea to save your money versus spend it and that the bank or lending institution will pay you interest for 'borrowing' your money.  We give Benjamin an allowance for doing some farm chores.  Some things he is not paid for as there are jobs that you are expected to do just for being part of the family.  As an added incentive, we give him 50 cents for every dozen eggs we sell.  He's saved some money over the years and it is sitting in a savings account.  I wanted to show him the concept of compound interest so we got out his latest bank statement to show him what he's earned in interest.

Benjamin: So Dad, how often does the bank pay me for keeping my money in the savings account?
Dad: Well, they pay you once a quarter - that's once every 3 months.
Benjamin: How much did they pay me for the last quarter.
Dad: Hmmm.  Let's check your bank statement.  Right here, they made a quarterly interest payment to you for 12 cents.
Benjamin: (long silence)  Umm, Dad, can I use twenty dollars of my savings to buy a Star Wars LEGO set I've had my eyes on?

This is going to be harder than I thought, but honestly, the incentive is not there to save.  With inflation you are losing money.  Even a kid knows it's probably smarter to spend it.  We did discuss risk and reward and I showed him that you can definitely make a higher rate of return in the stock market, but the risks of loss are much greater.

Benjamin is motivated, however, and figured out that collecting cans can be a money making venture.  He researched and found that it takes 31 cans to make a pound of aluminum and that the going rate is $0.40 per pound, so it takes about 80 cans to make a dollar.  I don't know about where you live, but people throw many "dollars" out of their window around my house and Benjamin aims to pick them up and convert them into profit.  Cha ching!

So he asked me to go walking down the road with him yesterday, pulling a wagon and picking up cans.  Off we went.  As we walked about a mile down the road and back, picking up cans, we had a good chance to talk about life, how home school is going and we also observed many things, including:

#1 Why do people litter?  I don't have an answer to that question, but I remember when someone threw paper out of the car window and it fell at the feet of this guy and it made him sad (Remember that?):

Photo Credit

#2 A neighbor of ours has a serious erosion problem going on:

Losing his land

In our area both the Parish as well as individuals use Round-up to keep the fence rows and ditches clean so they don't have to mow it, but the roots of those grasses hold the soil together.  The absence of those roots mean that with every rain, more and more topsoil erodes and is washed into the roadside ditches.  It won't be long before the fence falls over.  What a mess!  If I paid for my land, I'd like to keep it, thank you very much.

#3 Goldenrods: 

Goldenrods in front of the house

The first thing I thought of when I saw these was allergies.  After reading about them, though, on two separate websites, I found that the reputation of the poor Goldenrod has been ruined through guilt by association.  The real culprit of allergy problems is ragweed and Goldenrod and ragweed often occupy the same areas.  I don't have a good sense of smell, but Benjamin says goldenrod smells good.  He went to sniff it and a bee almost flew up his nose.  Bees were all over the place gathering up the pollen.

Native Americans chewed the leaves of a young goldenrod to relieve sore throats and chewed the roots to relieve toothaches.  Who knew?  I have a pharmacy in the roadside ditch across from my house!

Full of flowers and sticky pollen - our bees love this stuff!

After about 30 minutes we collected about 93 cans or roughly $1.16.  

Precious metals

We crushed the cans as we pick them up to conserve space.  Once we got home, we dumped them out and counted them.

93 crushed aluminum cans

Not a whole lot of value there.  Neither me or Benjamin will be getting rich off of what we picked up in the ditch in 30 minutes.  The real value, though, came in time spent with him along the way - a great investment in my book.