harvest

an early trip to the supermarket took me by the bean field and i find it has been harvested despite the "native" plants that had populated the field so happily...you can see it was no til by the corn detritus that is still matted on the the field....there are slowly decomposing stalks and cobs all over...a tonne of corn cobs contains about twenty-two pounds of nitrogen so leaving them will add to soil fertility ( slowly...they take a long time to decompose ) and soil organic matter...nothing wrong with that...from a distance, and even moderately close up, the field looks bare...no machinery is completely efficient though and as i looked around the one unharvested bean pod i originally found turned into quite a few around the field and, from the looks of things, the combine missed the entire row along the berm where, because it was so infused with other plants, the combine operator flat missed it...so there will be browsing going on...that stand of trees on the other side of the field leads down to deep river and there are bound to be white tail deer in there...when winter finally arrives and time get tough the leftovers will be consumed..and the field manured..nutrient cycles closing...not nearly enough of that going on.