pioneer road

the fallow, bush hogged field behind the big box stores is once again teeming with pioneer plants and they are working well into autumn to insure there is another round of plants in a few months...that plant in the second photo is not a thistle and if it weren't so tall i'd call it a variety of clover...which it may be...or may not...identification will take some research...starting with the usda's guide to native plants...the third photo is the ubiquitous dandelion going to seed and the fourth photo is a thistle...there are lots of those out there...the fifth photo is of some skeletal reminders that this was a cornfield at one time...and the cracks in the soil indicate that october has been an exceedingly dry month on the south end of the inland sea...just down the road is the road to nowhere..it would seem complete...it has painted lines and a sidewalk and its end is clearly demarcated by the crash barriers...that it leads exactly nowhere is, perhaps, a reflection of the zeitgeist...there is a framework for a sign out in the distance...it may provide some information as to what to expect when the process is complete...it may also say only "available" or "commercial space for rent"...as if there isn't enough already.

concretenism?

the pioneer plants continue to colonize the bush hogged field behind the big box stores....there is a lot of thistle going on out there and there is some in the berm that was unmowed and is moving towards going to seed ( second photo )...the appearance of the fecund and ubiquitous dandelion is yet another sign that once a file is disrupted the succession of plant communities begins again...dna is relentless...on the other end of the field the heavy equipment has changed...a second wave of colonizers there as well...from the looks of things the installation of the underground apparatuses is complete and my best guess is that some sort of pavement is due soon enough...that's a manhole cover perched on top of that concrete structure...so is this a parking lot in utero? or some sort of industrial drainage system...and for what? we will be finding out soon enough.

hand dig?

the heavy machinery has moved into the building site on what was once a farm field...doubtlessly not the first heavy machine to grace the field but it makes me wonder just how seriously frontier communications' admonition is going to be taken...what sort, i wonder, of commercial property are we seeing being born here...hard to know when the only signs i see ( along with that painted line on the pavement ) tell me that access to the big box stores from sterling creek road will be limited sometime in the near future as those concrete behemoths go in the ground...if you gaze directly south from the building site you see an unbroken vista of farm fields, trees, and sky...as well as the occasional microwave tower that makes your cellphone go..that anthropogenic landscape is for sale too...the nexus is always in flux and its advance or retreat is tied to the economy...perhaps...maybe this is all speculation

the nexus advances a step

so much for tracking the development of volunteer corn...the field full of pioneer plants i was exploring last monday ( top photo ) has been rendered comparatively barren in the last four days or so...i was somewhat perplexed...it is certainly far too late for a standard monoculture crop and a touch early for winter wheat ( though not much ) which was the only possible planting i could think of...there are still corn cob around ( fourth photo as if i need to tell you that ) and there are still a few stubborn plants standing...but as i drove around the other end of the field stubborn plants weren't all i found standing...grades stakes with specific notations have cropped up along with little lags for buried cables and other underground infrastructure...add in the concrete drainage fittings and sumps and there is a fair indication that the suburban sprawl and subsumed yet another agricultural field and the nexus had moved a bit more south...i am a bit saddened by this...the corn filed across sterling creek road has a "for sale" sign up on it now too...i am becoming something of an afficionado of suburban agriculture and its constraints...this lessens my readily observable suburban agricultural space and sends me farther afield to find information and check conditions...the field behind the big box stores is no more..it was bound to happen...mindless "growth" won't have it any other way...here's to the eventual collapse and simplification...plant spuds as a subversive act.

nexus events

i was out and about going to the garden center at the local home improvement store to pick up some supplies for the community garden and i had a look in at the field behind the big box stores ( the home improvement place is one of the big box stores which is pretty much how i stumbled on this particular suburban field )...something seems to be up and what caught my eye was what caught my eye when it was a no till bean field last season, corn stalks...last spring it was because there was a crop growing between the still standing remains of corn stalks from the previous fall's harvest...their stubborn existence is what tipped off the no till...those stalks were still around earlier this spring, but they're gone now which leads me to believe someone has been working it...to what purpose still eludes me...there is still a lot of dense yellow #2 detritus out there...nothing has been turned under...and the only thing growing out there is botany with no intrinsic economic value in it ( i.e. dandelions and thistle )...so we will have to wait a bit to see what's what out there...you can see by the top photo that there has been considerable rain here recently and as i traveled the fringes of the nexus i stumbled across some evidence of the erosive impact of that rain...these will be obliterated when the field is plowed for planting but that still doesn't negate the negative impact annual monocultures have on land..erosion...chemical runoff...extruded, processed food...and that's just a start...the list seems endless.

gleaning II

running saturday morning errands took me past the cornfield so i stopped by to see if the local critter population had been gleaning what the combine missed...there's still quite a bit of corn out there both loose and on cobs...it's difficult to quantify what was there in the first place 9 i wasn't in the mood to count cobs and individual kernels ) but i have noticed that the left over corn on the periphery of the field is diminished while the interior still has a ( for me ) surprising amount of grain laying about...the harvest has highlighted the suburban location of the field...with a walmart, sears hardware, and a lowes on the north, condos on the east side, and "improved" roads all around its days as a farm field are probably numbered...we'll see in may. "the united states paves over roughly 170,000 hectares ( 420,078.5 acres ) of cropland per year" [gardener 1996]