Have I told you that we have decided not to cut the pasture for hay this year?
The neighbor who has cut it for almost two decades before we moved in called to say the pasture was not growing so well anymore and needed fertilizer. He could not afford to do it.
I called the local feed and seed and learned that fertilizer is more than $1300 a ton for the work and the chemicals. I did not even ask how many acres a ton would cover.
So we made the choice to let the field grow the summer long, and brush hog the 16 acres in late Fall, leaving the cuttings in place. That way, the soil nutrients incorporated into grass biomass above ground will go back into the soil and not into tons of hay, carried off to fatten beef cattle.
That seems to be the right choice. I look forward to watching the field evolve through early succession over a couple of summers, if we are given them.
Already, the indented green passage of the mowed path to the woods stands in contrast, depressed against the waist-high grasses, unmowed and going now to seed.
Early on, we are seeing different activity and variety in the standing grass, a visible palette for the winds to paint its swirls and broad strokes. How alive and animated it seems when the wind blow—and it always blows. And I am not the first to be inspired by the spirits of the wind. I wander off in an etymological daydream.
…that the words for ancient roots for wind (anemos and spritus) also point to the vital property giving rise to life and breath. (Online Etymological Dictionary)
Anemos
It is the hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by: Sanskrit aniti "breathes;" Greek anemos "wind;" Latin animus "rational soul, mind, life, mental powers, consciousness, sensibility; courage, desire," anima "living being, soul, mind, disposition, passion, courage, anger, spirit, feeling;" Old Irish anal, Welsh anadl "breath," Old Irish animm "soul;" Gothic uzanan "to exhale," Old Norse anda "to breathe," Old English eðian "to breathe;" Old Church Slavonic vonja "smell, breath;" Armenian anjn "soul."
Spiritus
mid-13c., "animating or vital principle in man and animals," from Anglo-French spirit, Old French espirit "spirit, soul" (12c., Modern French esprit) and directly from Latin spiritus "a breathing (respiration, and of the wind), breath; breath of a god," hence "inspiration; breath of life," hence "life;" also "disposition, character; high spirit, vigor, courage; pride, arrogance,"
At last, I came back into the moment, still standing at the sliding glass doors where I will do most of my wind watching until it is warmer out. And I will tell you that there is more than the wind that lives, vital and brooding, over and within the deeps of the green sea beyond our porch.
The fireflies inspirit our field the past few nights in the warm, moist dark of May, rising in their hundreds, wave upon wave. Had the hay been cut, the shorn but tidy acres would not have hosted this welcomed vision so reminiscent of my deep-south childhood, barefoot in the zoyzia grass past bed time.
The very next morning as the first sun steamed dew from the glistening grasses—where the fireflies had danced in the dark— I thought at first that I had might have come under a spell; that, in a poetic moment of willing self-delusion, I was being tricked.
For all at once in that sorcery, up from the waist-high field, rose dozens of bright yellow spirits--transmogrified night insects?--rising, animated, inspirited, a migrating flock of Goldfinches who had dropped down from nowhere and disappeared into an acre of our sea of green.
Recently metamorphosed from their night-selves with the yellow green lights, the hundred yellow sprites flashed their black wings, suddenly rising in a great hurry to move north to summer nesting grounds, only to swirl like the wind and settle back down, disappearing once more, into our field of dreams.
Fred, we also wait to bush hog our field in the fall. The butterflies appreciate our tall milkweed and ground nesting birds can do their thing! Gorgeously, poetically written!
I'm glad that your land will now be host for wildlife instead of cattle.