Progress on the “Bee & the Clover” has slowed, partially due to Covid-19. Our contractor was ill with the virus and so has been recovering. Since I last posted about two months ago, the outside of the building is nearly complete. We await the installation of the roll-up garage door and the upstairs porch’s construction, and the decking downstairs. The details of the interior, sheet-rock, cabinets, plumbing, electricity are all in the future.
Chris Helzer, The Prairie Ecologist, is a naturalist and photographer whose fascinating work has inspired me. He conducted a project a couple of years ago in which he photographed a single square meter of a mature prairie every week for a year. In the process, he photographed 113 different species of plants and animals, including 15 plant species, 22 different flies, 18 beetles, and 14 bees. You can watch a brief video of his project.
I’m going to try my own square meter project on our nascent prairie, just to see what I can observe here. So here are some of the first shots from the dead of winter.
The obvious occupant of the space is the tall Alamo Switchgrass plant, one of the “big four” tall-grass prairies.
The other obvious occupant of the ground is the Little Bluestem, another “big four.” In the fall, Little Bluestem takes on a deep red-brown color. The tiny fuzzy white seeds are a treat for the sparrows and meadowlarks in the prairie.
The dried-up rustweed once carpeted the floor of the field in green with tiny white flowers. In the fall, it turned a deep rusty red.
In December each year, you can begin to see the Sandyland Bluebonnets appear. These are not the Texas Bluebonnets with flowers bearing the distinctive white tops. These produce entirely blue flowers.
So once a week, I plan to visit the site and see what shows up besides me.
We had crews out here three days this week. The windows and front doors were installed, some of the metal frame detail was finished, and today the metal building crew began to attach the Hawaiian Blue siding. We weren’t sure how a blue barn would look on the prairie, but we are very pleased. They’ll be back on Monday to add some more.
This week the framers returned to begin to put some skin on the bones of the Bee & the Clover. Doors and windows arrived on Friday and windows were installed on Saturday. We climbed up to the second floor to look around. When the walls are up, these views will not be available any longer. Outside the front door, however, overlooking the garden, will be a porch extending out ten feet and will provide a nice view to the SW.
Meanwhile downstairs, windows will face the NW and the SE. Doors will face the garden on the SW.
On Monday of last week, a big flat-bed truck from the lumber yard arrived with the materials for the interior framing of the three bedrooms in the barndorminium.
The framing crew showed up early on Tuesday and then again Wednesday through Friday. By the end of the week, the two downstairs rooms were framed out, and the joists and decking for the second floor were in place.
We hope to see the second floor completed this week. It is good to be able to see the progress.
On Monday afternoon the structural steel arrived and early Tuesday morning the crew was busy on the site. Tuesday and Wednesday were spent unloading the steel and welding pieces in place in preparation for construction.
On Thursday the big Genie Telescopic Telehandler was unloaded and construction began.
The first steel column was standing by about 10 AM on Thursday.
Soon there were four.
Then by late afternoon on Thursday, the main rafters were welded to the columns on the bedroom end of the building.
By quitting time on Thursday the outline of the structure on the bedroom end was done. It was fun to get an exact idea of the size and shape of the building for the first time.
Friday went much faster. Four more columns and their main rafters were up by noon. Then more purlins were welded in place. Next week, perhaps we’ll see some skin on the bones.
When we were first planning the prairied restoration, we were cautioned to have patience. Grasses don’t grow like vegetables in a garden. It takes time. One wildlife biologist explained that the first year after they germinate, they use their energy to put down deep roots. “They go deep,” she said. The second year the plant grows larger and puts on leaves. “They creep,” she explained. About the third year the “tall grasses” earn their name. “They leap,” she told us.
We planted our grasses from seed twenty-one months ago. Thousands germinated and we could see those little tufts of grass on top of the ground that were working hard to extend their roots deep into the sandy loam of our field. Many will grow twice as far underground as they appear above the ground. We witnessed a lot of creeping going on this year. The plants were more extensive and more noticeable.
Most of the grasses still have a way to go, but a good number of them have started leaping. We have Alamo Switchgrass that is taller than I am growing near the house, and the seed heads are more massive than my head. Little Bluestem, Big Bluestem, and Yellow Indiangrass are flourishing, blooming, and forming beautiful seed heads as well. Eastern gamagrass, Sideoats grama, Purple Lovegrass, and Green Spangletop are leaping as well in many places. This is the time of year when these warm-weather grasses do best. A walk in the prairie this morning produced some evidence of all the leaping taking place.
Today, 2 September will be the first day in many on the Creech Prairie, where the temperature does NOT reach 100 degrees. Yesterday we saw 102 with a feel-like temperature of 119.7! It’s been like this since late July. But the forecasts indicate that yesterday may have been our last blast of heat. We’ll be moving into a more seasonable mid-90s as we make our way to the 80s of late September. Today, for the first time, since August 22 (and before that, August 3), we had a bit of rain. We are hoping for more over the next few days. So, hot and dry. That’s Texas in August. And the prairie has shown it. Wherever you walk, you hear the crunch of dry grass, and only a few lonely sunflowers serve as reminders of the wildflowers that sometimes blanket the field.
August and September are the growing seasons for the grasses of the tallgrass prairie. The big four––switchgrass, big bluestem, little bluestem, and yellow indiangrass––and the others––eastern gamagrass, sideoats grama, green spangle top, and lovegrass––are doing their best with the little moisture they’ve had to work with. Perhaps a wet September will meet their needs.
How do we prepare for the future in the midst of a pandemic? Such preparation for a day in which we will be able to gather again, living with some sense of normality, can feel foolish.
With Jerusalem surrounded by Babylonian armies and its destruction imminent, the LORD instructed the prophet Jeremiah to make a real estate purchase. That seemed a waste of money. He bought a field in Anathoh, about three miles NE of Jerusalem. His cousin Hanamel sold it to him for seventeen shekels (probably glad to get something for it!) and he and Jeremiah signed and sealed the deed. The Lord instructed Jeremiah to preserve the deed in hope of a day when people would return to Jerusalem and pick up life again.
Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Take these deeds, both this sealed deed of purchase and this open deed, and put them in an earthenware jar, in order that they may last for a long time. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land.
Jer. 32:14–15, NRSV
Our pastor in San Antonio, John Garland, closes each service with a benediction that includes the phrase, “Risk something big for something good.”
We have felt a bit like Jeremiah lately. With social life being disrupted by the Covid-19 crisis, one of our dreams has been called into question. Since 2014, we have been working with a vision for using our land to help educate seminary students around issues of ecology and agriculture. That vision was stirred when I attended a Seminary Stewardship Alliance annual meeting in Winston-Salem, NC in 2014 and heard of the farm operated by the Methodist Theologcial Seminary of Ohio. Melinda wondered why we couldn’t do something similar. The vision has been refined over these six years. We’ve engaged the prairie restoration project, found partners in both Waco and the Floresville area, and hosted two classes from Truett Seminary on Creation Care and Spiritual Practice. Meanwhile, Truett Seminary is partnering with the World Hunger Relief Farm in Waco to establish a program in Theology, Ecology, and Food Justice.
Neighbors have been kind enough to keep students in their homes, since we couldn’t have everyone here. But we wanted to build a “barn-dorminium” that would have rooms for guests to stay in. We set money aside each month toward the project. Our architect son has patiently drawn and redrawn plans as we have refined the project. We have been disappointed by talking to contractors whose bids far exceeded our means. But this past spring, we had a plan and a contractor who matched our budget. He sent us a contract to sign. And before we could sign it, Covid-19 struck. We didn’t think it wise to tie up our savings in the project when we didn’t know what was coming next. So, we hit the pause button.
Last month, after prayer and some discernment, we felt it was right to go ahead. We signed the contract and wrote a check for the down payment. We risked something big for something good. Like Jeremiah, we did this in hope that the days would come in which we’d be able to carry out the vision.
In preparation for the construction, Melinda and I removed as many as possible of the hundreds of prairie grasses growing where the building will stand. These will be transplanted to other parts of the field. We’re going to share some of them with our family in Houston (our architect and consultant) for the pocket prairie they are developing in their back yard.
And now ground is being broken. By the end of the year, the blue barn will be in place. It will have a garage/barn on one end, a breezeway and deck in the middle, and three dorm rooms on the other end (two on the first floor and one above them). We hope to use the building to house students, interns, and guests. It will stand across the driveway from our garden, between two large pecan trees my grandmother planted thirty years ago and will extend into the prairie itself.
We are holding this with open hands, ready to discern the ways in which it can be put to use when the exiles return.
