FROG JUMP FAIR AND MONSTER GRASS.

The County Fair is symbolic as a place to have fun. My youngest daughter had a horse, a couple of hogs, and multiple dairy goats at this fair. She worked the fair in high school cleaning horribly gross restrooms for FFA and decided she’d never come back after graduating high school.

But she did. Her two boys loved the unique experience of jumping a frog. The frog is placed on the lily pad. You can slap your hands, scratch the mat behind it or holler at it but you can’t touch it.

The monitors measure the distance of the three jumps and a collector (probably a kid from FFA) gathers up the frog and sends it back to the frog hotel. Ahhh! So it goes, for 4 days until the finals on Sunday. A $1,000 prize is offered for the longest jump.

I went with a friend who has bad asthma and can’t walk very much in the spring. We stayed atop the hillside and sat on the grass and listened to music and peeked into the buildings that had booths for aroma therapy, jewelry made from bullets, leather shoes and buckles.  We didn’t see anything we couldn’t live without.

My goal was to find some purple earrings and eat junk food. The garlic fries with Parmesan cheese and parsley were excellent. I tasted Karen’s and  ate a huge polish sausage with lots of onions and bell pepper, mustard and ketchup. Yum!

The carnival looked like fun, but you have to walk back up that hill and it wouldn’t due for Karen. The hay filled barns and rodeo dust were off-limits, too.  I didn’t mind. There will be another fair next year. I was glad to get away and spend the day in the sunshine and wear my trashy biker clothes and earrings. I looked for a one-day-only tattoo and couldn’t find where I hid them. And, I actually didn’t have any leathers, but I pretended.  I didn’t find any purple earrings to buy. I’ve got my eye on a funnel cake for next year. It takes two to eat one, but we watched a young girl polish one off. (Shouda took a pic.)

I came home to “grass power.”  These beautiful grasses are California native bunch grasses. They don’t need water summer or winter, but this winter they got plenty of water and showed how powerful they can be.

You can barely see my chicken coop. They have overpowered my yard and have managed to spread everywhere on my three acres. I absolutely love them. I bought 5 different bunch grasses for their special attributes but only two actually liked my property. Normally, I wait until they dry and go to seed, then have them mowed or use the weed eater. But not this year.

My lower gate is blocked and I can’t open but about 8 inches,  just to squeeze through. This is a driveway. So, today, the mulching machine is coming to chew them up. Even when they are young plants, the roots are so strong you can’t pull them up. And that is what I wanted. I’m Certified Wildlife Habitat and I don’t ever spray or poison things. And when I walk my property, I feel the loamy, soft, rich soil. I walk through a wonderland of lady bugs and ear wigs and other beneficial insects.  I have bees buzzing about, huge lizards, a couple of toads and birds nesting. All is good and healthy and it makes me feel wonderful to have saved a patch of native grasses that once kept California a green state. The native grasses were long ago overcome by Spanish grasses that migrated with cattle coming from Mexico.  A few patches were rescued from cemeteries and other hilly areas where cattle didn’t graze.

The grasses have strong roots; they hold the soil; they are fire resistant. They make good forage for grass-eating animals. What’s not to like?
The mulcher will do in two days what would take me a month with a machete to do. The birds and the bees and the bats are making babies and feel welcome and safe here. I love it.

NATIVE CALIFORNIA BUNCH GRASS.

Arriving home after six busy weeks is always an adjustment, as strange as that might seem. I look for things in a drawer that are in the  motor home. I'm out of mustard here, but not in the motor home. I'm unpacked, have pursued all important mail, and finally took a walk around my yard. Three giant strawberries were munched quickly. The last of the crop, no doubt.

My cinnamon bush was the only thing in bloom, inundated with tall rye grasses that didn't get pulled.

Unstable weather has negatively affected my orchard. If a fruit tree blooms and then it snows or rains, the pollen gets washed away before it has a chance to set fruit. One walnut tree, the early bloomer, has walnuts beginning to mature. The other, nothing.

One almond tree has a few green leaves at the top; dead from borers, it will need to be cut down before I leave.  As an aside,  notice the golden grass of my orchard.

A few pears maturing, but a disease called black spot afflicting the tree.  My orchard does not get sprayed since I'm certified wildlife habitat and don't use poisons.  They would be healthy with better care, mulching, selective pruning, better water. Care  that I no longer give them because I'm traveling so much of the year. It is a choice I've made at this late stage in my life.

But I have a healthy crop of native California  bunch grass.  It may look like weeds to you (and everybody else), but I'm very proud of this ninety foot strip of grass because it took years to get it to flourish and fill in this side bar to my driveway where this grass gets no water.   This is the first year I didn't have it cut and allowed it to go completely to seed.  My quest to grow native California bunch grass came about from a feature story I wrote sometime in the 1980's. I interviewed a 93 year old woman who owned a family diary telling the story of her ancestor's  trip by wagon train to seek gold in California.  The diary described the glory of cresting the last mountain and looking down on the green, green grass of the Central Valley near Sacramento. It was July in the diary, and I knew that grass in July is not green in California, it is golden brown. Thus, I questioned the authenticity of the diary. I probed a bit, and asked her if someone had copied the diary from another source?  No, it was original. I was stumped. I went to the library and did some research and found out that California was once as green as other states. It was the incursion of Spanish grasses from the horses and cattle imported into California by Spanish soldiers  that obliterated most native bunch grasses that stay green during California's hot, rainless summers. Aha!  Now you know where I'm coming from. I planted about five different bunch grasses and only two types survived. This particular grass flourished, and the other one hangs on in small patches. One thing I will continue to do, is pick the seeds and spread them and attempt to protect a California Native and have a green yard all summer with bunch grasses.