posted 7 years ago
When I was a kid growing up in central Kansas, there was an old-timer in our church whose father had pioneered the land that he grew up on, and now was being farmed by his son. He talked about his father plowing the original prairie behind two mules, and then when they got to the edge of their land, his dad plowed one more furrow and then it was his job as a kid to drop a hedge apple into the furrow every 10 steps and back-fill around it.
That man was about 80 years old.
Those old hedgerows of osage orange were still there on the border of his fields. Most of those trees had survived from his childhood, all those decades earlier.
That was almost 50 years ago. I'd be curious if any of those old trees are still there.
After the dirty-thirty dust-bowl years, thousands and thousands of miles of osage orange shelter belts where planted across Kansas. I grew up and there were millions of those old trees still around, but as farmers were driving larger and larger tractors, they were tearing those old shelter belts out ---- they wanted long open fields where they didn't have to make a turn every 1/4 mile. The wood makes great rot-resistant fence posts (albeit, it usually isn't very straight), and as a kid, those sticky hedge apples made great ammo for our various battles.
"The rule of no realm is mine. But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, these are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail in my task if anything that passes through this night can still grow fairer or bear fruit and flower again in days to come. For I too am a steward. Did you not know?" Gandolf