This weekend, I looked at the kudzu. I mean I really looked at it. Until now, it had occupied my peripheral vision. I knew it was there, of course, but I hadn’t gotten a good look.
The farm and I have been in a honeymoon stage. I am still not ready to acknowledge it’s faults. Besides, this is the south. Of course there is kudzu. There is kudzu everywhere.
Since Wayne bush-hogged around the field a couple weeks ago, I can now drive the truck all the way around it. Which I did for the first time on Sunday. Along the west side of the field we saw humming birds and I stopped to pick some wild blackberries. Sure, the Japanese Honeysuckle has swallowed the fence and created a dense hedge, and there is plenty of privet, but there are native plants, too, like elderberry and sassafras.
Then, we rounded the corner to the north side of the field and hit the kudzu. From there, it is kudzu, kudzu, kudzu all the way around the north, east, and south sides of the field. Already growing across the bush-hogged path, choking trees, obscuring all other vegetation in a dense blanket.
I stared at it long and hard. I started to panic.
I started thinking about what it means to be stewards of this land. I don’t have any answers or fantastic insights, just questions swirling through my head.
I have a pretty good idea of what is means to steward our cropland – building soils and biodiversity, preventing erosion, growing organically – but I haven’t really thought about how to steward the margins. What does it mean to be a steward the hill slopes and the gullies?
The solution to the kudzu is goats (we hope). We had been planning on goats anyway. In my mind we were planning on getting goats in the hazy, idyllic future, at some undetermined time, after getting the vegetable cropping down as not to overwhelm ourselves with too many enterprises. Maybe next year, maybe not.
Thanks, frankly, will not do. We need to get goats NOW. This is an emergency situation. I don’t think we can afford to give the kudzu another year’s advantage on us. I might start having nightmares.
