Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Land
In some of my job search locations, a guy can buy a house with acres of land. This would make some sense if we kept horses or sheep or whatever, but in my middle age I’ve realized I don’t need land. And yet, I cannot deny the appeal.
Karen and I both grew up in homes with relatively small back yards. My first house had a back yard and a “back back yard,” an area beyond a fence which was undeveloped and which was, beyond question, more fun that our St. Augustine-green back yard. There were horned lizards in the back back yard, and wild native plants, and a broken down area of fence where I could cut across to our neighbor Sadie’s back yard, and that was a jungle. Sadie’s idea of yard maintenance was to let the place achieve its own equilibrium. You could easily imagine man-eating vines and quicksand and all manner of other threats.
When we moved to Texas, we rented at first, but eventually we bought a house in the hills northwest of San Antonio. We had an acre of land and it was largely unusable thanks to chiggers and nasty burrs and, most of all, fire ants.
Land ownership meant walking my property no less than every two weeks with a big jug of Sevin (a neurotoxic bug poison), sprinkling mound after mound with the nasty white powder. It was a hopeless battle. My only solace was the fact that the little bastards never once invaded our home (but the scorpions did). What did they find to eat out there? Chiggers, no doubt. The land was barren scrub, save for a few oak trees close to our house; the soil was yellow calichi, also known as “hard pan,” which is a far more descriptive and accurate term.
So we couldn’t garden in the stuff, not without putting down a ton of real topsoil, and thanks to the burrs and fire ants we couldn’t let Jake play outside. We had a tortoise, Sydney, who liked to roam the perimeter and dig his way underneath the fence. He was looking for tortoise babes. Twice, he made it to our neighbor’s yard, and she kindly returned him. On the third escape, he made it into the wastes which lay beyond our property’s western edge. I hope he found someone.
Since then, we haven’t had much land. Oh, on paper the lot in Oregon was 3/4 acre, but much of it was unusable due to those nasty salmonberry vines. (Really, if we had to have berries, why couldn’t we have had blackberries?) I had some land for a garden and managed to keep a few flowers alive, as well as a humongous rosemary bush. You have to really work to kill rosemary.
I wish I had more time to garden. Like my grandfather, who took a distinctly masculine pride in growing squash four times as large as was sold in the market, I like dirt, I like to grow things. But I like so many other things so much better. Gardening tends to take a back seat.
I’m getting old: all I want is enough land for a hot tub.
D.
I like the idea of having land to do with what you want, but I think it would just become a jungle of weeds and whatever else because I don’t have the inclination to go out there and work it. A garden would be nice though, with fresh veggies.
My few acres makes for a nice cushion between me and the neighbors. When the loggers came through buying all the timber mine was the only patch of trees left. The deer appreciate it. I guess that is my main reason for owning land. What I can afford won’t be logged or turned into a shopping mall. I wish I could save more. But it’s there, a nice green, living cushion between me and the rest of the world.
We’d love a garden and lots of land, but we don’t love yard work, so until we can afford a gardener, it’s not happening. Nice point above about having a buffer between the neighbors, but that requires more land than the usual suburban postage stamp. So for now, it’s the orchid jungle in my office (not that I have a habit – I could give them up at any time) and the window boxes on the balcony.
I do believe that if you had dug out a couple of vines of the Siberian blackberries (the big ones with the big mother hooks on them, rather than the native ones with the myriad small incredibly sharp hooks) and planted them, they’d have overwhelmed the salmonberries in a few years.