Saturday, July 4, 2009

This is what I did this afternoon. Around here, many of the farms that don't have a good spring end up buying and hauling water to fill cisterns. There are large areas of our county that do not have a public water system. We pay for our remote, private and very beautiful farm by not having some of the things other people take for granted. Much of the time, we get enough water from our dug well, but its been a dry spring here in southern Ohio. We've gotten enough rain to keep the grass green, but not enough to really keep creeks, wells and springs running well. The town of Caldwell has a building where we go to fill our tanks. Its 50 cents per 100 gallons, and this tank holds 210 gallons. I made 3 trips today, and topped off the cistern. Now we can do laundry, take showers, flush - without worrying if the well will go dry.
While I was driving back and forth to Caldwell, I was enjoying the flowers all along the route.
There is a lot of birdsfoot trefoil growing in this area. The coal company uses it to fix nitrogen in soils after the mineland is reclaimed, and its naturalized. The roadsides and especially the median on the freeway (I-77) are bright yellow this time of year. Below is a closeup.

Peas are another plant used to set nitrogen and also as a groundcover along cuts made in the hills to help level out highways. The bright pink flowers in the foreground are peas, and in the background is another groundcover/nitrogen source, crownvetch.
I thought these flox are pretty. They are pink rather than the purple we see on the edge of the woods earlier in the spring. I'm not sure if these are wild flowers, or some escapees of a flower bed that have started to naturalize along the road. There are several patches on Chapel Drive.

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