So, when we heard about Bryan Stow’s beating, we were disgusted, and we were worried about the state of sportsmanship. My husband likes to take the kids to games now and then, and to think something like this could happen to them is beyond me – I almost put the kibosh to it. 

Of course we immediately heard reports and saw a pretty damning video tape of Stow’s behavior, but I’m sorry, being an ass is not a death penalty offense. 

That said, we were sad to hear the other day that Stow’s insurance company had decided not to pay for his continued residential care. He’s been evicted from the facility at which he was receiving follow-up physical therapy, but his family says he’s still unable to take care of himself. The insurance company has also refused to pay for live-in nursing. Stow’s family is on their own with a guy who is not only unemployable, but unable to take care of his own immediate needs – he still needs help getting dressed, showering, needs his meals prepared, etc. 

But, it’s time for all of us to ask – how can we possibly expect a policy that costs us less than $20,000/year to cover bills that run over $100,000, $200,000, up to a million dollars just for an operation and a few weeks in the hospital? 

Bryan Stow ended up in care for two years. His attorneys estimate his life-long care will run over $50 million. 

It’s not the insurance company who’s the bad guy in this story, it’s the hospital, the doctors,  the administrators, the stock holders. These people enrich themselves off the misery of others. They sell rainbows they can’t provide, but they sure take some rainbow rides of their own. Doctors, as a group, are at the top of the  infamous “One Percent,” their incomes increasing by some 27 percent while the average person’s income increased by less than one percent, even DECREASED. 

And here comes Obamacare, which eliminates the Medicare Index pricing controls and tells us we are forced to buy insurance and subsequently forced to pay whatever rates doctors and hospitals want to charge for whatever care they determine we can afford. 

I  think we’re all in store for a good ass-kicking.

High noon, and I got dinner on the stove.

Here we have your standard macaroni casserole, with zucchini and crookneck squash, and some chopped ham, all swimming in homemade cheese sauce.

God if there’s one thing I hate (hah!) it’s standing over a hot stove on a hot afternoon or evening.  So, I been endeavoring to get dinner done before noon at least a few days a week.  Cold salads are also nice, but I got a teenager, and you know they need something that sticks to their skinny ribs, even in hot weather.

My grandma made a lot of casseroles. Last week we had her favorite, chicken and zucchini casserole, with home made croutons. The secret to a lot of my grandma’s casseroles, and most old lady casseroles, is a can of “cream of…” soup. Cream of chicken, cream of mushroom, cream of celery, no matter. You throw together whatever concoction of meat, vegetables and either noodles or bread or both, and then you float it all in a can or two of “cream of” soup, with some milk added of course to loosen the whole thing up. This mess sits in your oven and congeals into a lovely loaf of…well, kind of a loaf loaf. It’s full of food, and it tastes like MSG – what the hell else do you need to know about it?!

But, I don’t like canned soup, that taste never escapes me – tastes like CAN.  So I’ve learned to make my own white sauce, and add cheese when I want. Just takes practice – melt a few tablespoons of butter, stir in about a quarter cup of flour, and “brown it” – it will turn yellowy brown and look like greasy powder. Then slowly add milk, keeping the fire low, stirring it with a fork to keep it from sticking or lumping. Add black pepper, garlic salt, whatever herbs you like. Keep stirring, and as it thickens, add more milk. Keep doing this until you have about two cups. You can stir in a cup of grated cheese at this point – did I say, keep that flame LOW? – and it will melt in really fast, add it to your taste. 

You’ve already arranged your cooked macaroni and meat and squash in a casserole pan, so you can pour the sauce over it. I work it in gently with a fork so the sauce spreads through the casserole. Then I cover it with foil and bake it for about 30 minutes on 350.  It can be re-heated for dinner, but this will only take a few minutes, and the other pots and pans have been washed and put away, the mess is a memory. 

I enjoyed that show, Malcolm in the Middle.  Once a week or so, the mother would take all the edible leftovers out of the refrigerator, and smash it all into a Tupperware container, smash it down good, put the lid on, stick it back in the fridge.  She called it “Surprise Loaf” or something exciting, and the family gobbed it down faster than a Chinese fire drill. 

Anybody got a good casserole recipe please send it along.

Look at the middle of this picture, taken out my living room window. It looks far away, but it was so close we made eye contact.

If you have big trees on your property you probably get a lot of hawks. They love our neighborhood, a few blocks north of Bidwell Park, where people still appreciate big yards and big trees.

We have these black walnuts right alongside our house. When we rebuilt this place, we could have removed them, they were neglected, in pretty sad shape, and some people consider black walnuts a possible danger. Just the other day I was standing in my garden, and I heard some snapping and popping, and looked up just in time to see a 6 or 8 foot long branch, about as big around as my leg, come toppling down and split into chunks against the top of our little cedar fence. It was so dried out, just rotten through, I put it in my wood pile. My grandpa always told us kids, don’t linger around under a black walnut on a breezy day.

These trees shade the whole side of our little apartment, and they give us a lot of pleasure, so there they are. Mostly we get woodpeckers, from Flickers to Downies. They search the cracks in the bark for bugs, their long tongues flicking in and out.  We also get an occasional Nuthatch. Right now, the titmice have all fledged another brood, and they are swarming the trees looking for gall wasps. Takes a lot of gall wasps to make a meal, I imagine.

But the hawks usually stick to the enormous cedars in our front yard, or the oaks in the back acre. We have a lot of moles and gophers, I’m sure this is apparent from the air – every now and then I look out a window just in time to see a hawk make a low swoop. Today I was sitting here, and right outside the window, I heard this high-pitched call – “aw aw aw!”

I always wonder – what are they saying? Sometimes you hear an answering call, way over there…  I also notice, all the little birds, even blue jay, go suddenly silent. Bird “expert” Roger Lederer told me raptors mostly eat rodents, but one day I saw a kite catch and eat a little bird in my yard. I know, Nature, yadda yadda. 

But, I’ll tell you what pisses me off – if they included the “opt-out” info in the rag, people wouldn’t be coming around here to find it. I hate liars, and cheats. There’s a special place in Hell, and I’ll be there waiting, cause they send nags in there too, you know, poetic justice. 

I do get other  junk mail. Lately, Chase Bank has been hitting my mailbox weekly with credit card applications for both me and my husband. Yes, you can be frauded with this crap, don’t be dumb, get rid of it. I usually stand right in the post office sorting through it – I pull out anything with our name/address on it, toss the rest in the recycling bin, and take the sensitive stuff home to be shredded into my composter. 

Right there they’ve stolen time from my life, and who knows what this crap is doing to my grubs. 

But here’s something you can say for Chase Bank – they include the “opt-out” information!  At the bottom of my “prescreened offer of credit,” in bold face!

“You can choose to stop receiving “prescreened” offers of credit from this and other companies…” and they give you a phone number, and refer you to more information on the back. Turning the notice over, I find the snail mail addresses of the three companies that sell my personal information to advertisers. I hate phone calls, so, I’m sending a letter – I just took the words right out of the notice:

Experian, Inc.

701 Experian Parkway

Allen, TX

PO Box 2002, 75013-0036

 TransUnion Opt-Out Request

PO Box 505

Woodlyn, PA  19094-0505

 Equifax

PO Box 740123

Atlanta, GA  30374-0241

To Whom It May Concern:

I do not wish to receive prescreened offers of credit or credit card applications/offers from Chase Bank or any other company.

Thank you for your anticipated cooperation

In past I’ve written directly to Chase, and that was good for at least five years. We’ll see how this comes out. 

The strawberry pots worked out well – see how the berries are held out securely away from most pests.

I’m so glad I tried these strawberry pots one more time, this time making sure to add plenty of peat moss and keeping them on a regular watering schedule. The don’t take a lot of water, you just need to keep them wet with regular doses of small amounts. Mine are a morning routine, I use a container so I can make sure all the little cups are getting wet. But, drip would work. 

Looking for these red gems puts a spring in my step every morning.

I also planted strawberries in my bamboo pots. I get the bamboo as it grows under my fence from a neighbor’s yard. The heavy plastic pots provide anchorage and plenty of damp soil. The bamboo grows over 12 feet tall, and provides shade in the late afternoon heat. And it ‘s very compatible to strawberries.

These hanging baskets are working out okay after some mishaps.

The strawberries I planted in the hanging baskets have been an interesting experiment. The baskets don’t all hold enough dirt, the top most plants being strained and sad looking. But, as long as I water them religiously on  a schedule, they grow, and they’re strating to pay off. They were doing fairly well when that big North wind came up a couple of weeks ago, and dumped them on the ground beneath my clotheline. My husband happened upon them and used his Leatherman to fasten them on good, and now they are recuperating nicely.

The top plants are strained from the hot sun, but the lower baskets are lush and starting to put off ripe berries.

It’s nice to get something for work and patience. I don’t know how many times over the last month or so I’ve wanted to abandon these, but  reminded myself, they don’t really take a lot of water, and the payoff is literally “sweet”.

Here it is – already eaten as we speak.

My husband planted all kinds of tomatoes this year, plants he grew from seed as well as those we bought around town, or from friends. We ended up with so many, we didn’t have enough space in our garden. We gave some away, others we planted in big plastic tree pots from the nursery. They have turned out beautifully, and gave us our first ripe tomato yesterday.

This absolutely typical June weather will make my plants grow like crazy. Within a couple of days, our tomato plants will be up over our heads. 

This echinacea is growing out of a pot hardly bigger than a cereal bowl.

Look at this baby – must be that Worm Farm dirt!

The flowers are doing well too. These echinacea above grew from seeds we gathered from a plant we bought years ago at the Farmer’s Market. I grow them in containers all around the yard because they are a favorite of gophers. I watched one go down a hole right in front of me, and immediately went about digging up every one!

Can you believe that big plant in one little pot?

Containers have worked well so far, keeping the water usage down to a dull roar. And, it’s a fun routine, moving around the yard/garden looking for fruit and vegies among the leaves.

My relatives looked the same – six feet under. I don’t have many living relatives, and the old ones have a hard time making the trek. When they do, they are hardly in any condition to get out around town and take in the sights. So, after I drive my family up to the saddleback and dump them along the trail, I drive back to town, park in a shady spot in the commercial district,  and spend a pleasant hour or so ambling up to the cemetery and back.

My hillbilly relatives were miners. Grandpa George left Gramma Mahala behind in Illinois and headed for California in 1849. This was a man who was driven by fear of poverty – he was an immigrant with a wife, but no inheritance. He would be a laborer forever if he stayed, so he struck out for California. Over a year of backbreaking labor, he  struck a payoff in a coyote hole above Nevada City. Coyote hole mining, depicted in the first minutes of “There Will Be Blood,” was a dangerous and exhausting job – you looked for a vein, and you took your iron digging bar and your sledge hammer and you opened it up.  Oftentimes you used some blasting caps to open it up a little more.  The Empire Mine in Nevada City started as a coyote hole, and turned into one of the richest mines in the world.

My gramps did okay, although, one of the first things my gramma heard back in Illinois was that he’d lost one eye in a blast. That didn’t stop him.  Within a year, he had money to buy a ranch and go back to Illinois to get his family. During that time, he also received his naturalization paper, making him a US citizen. That document still hangs, all yellowed with time, on the wall in our family house.

My grandfather had come by boat, all the way around Cape Horn. I only know that he joined a group in Virginia and they hired a ship, that was pretty common at the time. I’ve seen his name on the “manifest,” or passengers list.  That’s all I know – he was literate, but not literary, never wrote a diary. I know nothing about his trip, but I can speculate given the accounts of others, and I’m sure it was a nasty ride. For one thing, ship’s captains were an odd lot, some of them colorful figures given to gambling, racing other captains for big cash prizes. It was a common trick to take the shorter but oftentimes more dangerous route through the strait of Magellan. This saved not only time but fuel and drinking water, which could be crucial.

I’m assuming that trip was too hair raising. When he came back for Gramma and the kids, my gramma Mary a newborn, they only took the boat as far as Nicaragua.  There was a popular crossing at the Isthmus of Nicaragua, by canoe and mule, and there may have been a short train line, I can’t remember. My grandma Mahala was carrying three young children, my gramma Mary a newborn. A fourth had died of a fever while his father was in California. She carried her toddlers in saddlebags on her mules and carried Mary in a shawl like the native women. At one point she was knocked off her mule by a low hanging tree branch, but without missing a skip she got back on her mule with Mary at her breast.  

That’s why my grampa George had married her. One of the only stories we have from him is his first sight of Mahala. He was working at a blacksmith shop on contract – he had shipped over as a contracted laborer. She brought in a string of her father’s wagon horses to be shod, carrying her shoes tied together across her mount’s bare shoulders. That really turned my grampa on – bare feet! “I knew she was the gal for me!” And she sure was.

She was a big woman, born and raised to make children and run a farm house. She brought a lot of stuff, that’s for sure, including the folding dining table that sits in my kitchen, leaves and all. She would need that gi-normous table in the years ahead, little did she know – she would go on to have six more children. All of them would have children – Mary alone would have eight children.

They took a steamer up from Nicaragua, a river boat to Marysville, and from there another mule train. They came to one of the worst towns in California. A year previous, a woman had been lynched by a mob in the center of town for the murder of a popular local man. This and lots of other “colorful” incidents gave the town a bad reputation – at one time, a top contender for state capital, it was also one of the only towns up there that had a stable enough economy to survive into modern times. They lost the bid for state capital because of their tawdry reputation.

My aunt, who was superintendent of schools in the area for about 30 years, told in her autobiography about towns  she had lived in as a child, thriving towns of 500 or more people, that were completely vanished by the time she grew up. She lived in Poker Flat as a child, and her mother had taught the last school at Summit City before that town was abandoned to the elements. Gramma Mary was 16 years old, with a year of teaching under her belt, when my grampa George loaded her onto a mule train for a town that was literally on top of a mountain, the weather so severe even the stone buildings built in it’s heyday have disappeared. Not even a stone foundation remained in many of these towns when my Aunt Belle rode through to inspect the county schools only 50 years later.

Aunt Bell was my great gramma’s sister, the family Idol. She never married, gave herself to the public service, was a pillar of the Methodist Church (meaning, one of the ladies who cleaned and cared for it), Superintendent of Schools for 30 years, and she served on the election board and other public boards right up until she stepped off a curb in front of a car in Newcastle in 1954, at about 85 years old. Not only our family, but the town, were devastated. I can still get the old ladies at the museum to bust a tear over that, and some of the old men too. They loved her, she was their school teacher. She held socials in her home, she knew how to pull taffy. She taught the local children fine handwriting.  She also took in her nieces and nephews every summer.

Our family has scattered. Gramma Mary was the only one of Mahala’s children to stay. She and my grampa JD had eight children, and they spread out too.  When my grandmother was 5 years old and living in Auburn with her family, a handsome man came to their gate and told her, “Young lady, please tell your mother that her brother Henry is home from Alaska.”  Henry had left 20 years earlier as a young man, off to the family business – the gold strike in Alaska. Like a lot of people, he was not lucky with a pick, and decided instead to run a trading post. That worked out so well, he didn’t come home for almost 20 years, sending word from time to time just to let the family know he was still alive. He stayed, married, and added to the family lineage. 

But nobody kept track of the cousins who’d strayed.  We even lost my gramma Mahala for a while, simply forgetting where she was buried. We knew that after grampa George had died, she’d gone to visit her children, and died while she was away. Town was snowed in, so she had to be buried  in the town she was visiting. Nobody remembered.  Old people get sketchy and lose confidence in what they think they remember.

My mother became a cemetery buff, and this she passed on to me. I can hardly pass a Gold Country cemetery without stopping to look for familiar names. My husband drove me all the way to Sierraville, on a tip from Cousin Flo. I’ll tell you what, Sierraville is UP THERE, at the Yuba Gap. We found the cemetery, and we looked and looked. It’s pretty spread out among the scrub.  I found my Cousin Amy and her husband Lafe, and next to those graves, the ground fell off, and I thought, “Oh, crap, my family’s been washed away, and Gramma too!” I told my old relatives that, and they believed me. We started thinking about getting ahold of the cemetery people, but we found out, the lady in charge was in her 90′s, and her memory was fading. We gave up.

Then one day, my cousin Flo, in her 80′s, was visiting the family graves closer to the old house, where she found a mason jar with a picture and a note. It was my cousin Rich – we’d never heard of this guy. But, he knew stuff only a cousin would know, so Flo invited him to meet the rest of us at the old house. She used to spend a couple of weeks there every summer, all the cousins would drop in and spend a few days, reminiscing the summers spent with Aunt Belle.  The stories they told – “barefoot in the Sierra” – but not a one of them could remember how to open a gooseberry!  We called this “The Cousin Reunion,” because these were the children of gramma Mary’s eight children. No matter how far these went, whoever they married, however many children they had, they always found their way back to the little house on Hwy 49. 

But we never had known what had happened to the descendants of gramma Mary’s siblings, until that day we met Rich. His grandmother was my Aunt Ida, Mary’s sister. She had married a fellow who worked for a logging company, and moved off to Sierraville – considered far away in the 1920′s, especially in winter.  A typo in the family book gave us the wrong last name, so when we stumbled upon her grave and those of her husband and many children and grandchildren, we didn’t realize it. We didn’t realize, there among this huge family, was my gramma Mahala. And families grow quickly apart – Ida’s children and grandchildren scattered toward Quincy and Graeagle, my side all migrated toward the valley below. My grandmother grew up in Auburn, and married a rice farmer from Glenn. My grandmother was a letter-writer, she tried to keep up. She would also try to reminisce to us, counting the old names on her fingers, trying to remember who married who and moved  where. We were too little to pay attention. 

But, I felt this weird twinge when Rich came looking for us. I must wonder, where are the others? Rich found them as far away as Independence. Rich had always been curious, so when he retired from PG&E, he just went looking for them. Found them in the phone book and called them up, had some good times looking over family photos, and got some family records to fill in the missing links.  

Rich brought other cousins, including Janet, who lives in Greenville. We got to talking, and she said, “My son lives in Chico – he pounds nails,” meaning, he did construction.  Within a few minutes, I found out, one of my husband’s longest running co-workers was my cousin.   

Which reminds me, when you come from a big family in a little tiny town, you should probably have a good knowledge of your spouse’s family history before you get married. Like they say in the hills, get a blood test! I heard a good joke at the museum – it’s hard to solve a murder up there because everybody has the same DNA, and nobody has any dental records.

I had determined to get up before sunrise, when the air is cool and nice. I set my stove alarm, because then I have to go all the way into the kitchen to turn it off, and that usually about does it, I’m too awake to go back to bed. But, not really awake enough to handle glass, apparently.

So, I made cowboy coffee in a Pyrex cup, and here I am, none the worse for wear. Although, I still tear up when I see my pretty little French press, sitting shattered in the sink. It was an indulgence I allowed myself with one of the Amazon.com gift certificates my father-in-law sent me for a years ago birthday.

I’m still glad to be up before the sun, sunrise being an event worth watching at least once or twice a week. And, no kidding, by 9am, it is going to be getting a little sweaty and unpleasant, and by 10, I will be camped out in the house under the ceiling fan.

I don’t even want to talk about this weekend, but I’ll say – Summer always starts with a bang around here, but it’s not unusual to have rain in June, either. And I remember Summers past when we never got out of the 90′s again after the first week of June. One year we didn’t get a ripe tomato until August. Last year I believe we had snow in late June. Hey, nobody tells Northern California what to do, okay? One of our best Father’s Days was right after a late snow at Lassen, we boarded Diamond Peak, because the road was covered and we couldn’t get to the summit. 

Be ready, that’s all I’ll say. Get a big watermelon, for one thing, and stick it in the fridge. Any melon you like really, and cucumbers, are nice to eat when the weather is hot. I don’t have any cukes in my garden yet, but they’ve got some nice ones at Safeway for 89 cents a pound. Chicken was on sale yesterday too – chicken is easy to cook outside, and if you remove the skin and bones, healthier for you. Chicken is good cold too. You can BBQ up a mess of boneless chicken breasts – I slice them thin with a filet knife so they cook quicker – and have cold chicken in the fridge for a couple of days.  Cheaper and more satisfying then lunch meat. 

Today we had planned a day trip, up in the mountains, where the air is a good 15 – 20 degrees cooler, and the creeks are full of snow melt. But, my son was offered a financial opportunity, and he cancelled our  trip. Well! When you coming home son? I don’t know when…

My husband wanted to plan our trip for Thursday – but I had to say NO! I have to go to a CARD meeting at 3pm. Sheesh! At least they have air conditioning in that little office.

So, we will try to get out of town on Friday, with the rest of the lemmings.  With predictions of 108, I imagine we will be in a swarm of locusts. I’ll try to get a picture of myself, sitting on a folding chair in the Yuba, reading “Life on the Mississipi…”

Saturday June 1, about 5pm

I realize Summer does not officially start until June 21, but it started for all practical purposes yesterday.

At about 11 am, I noticed the mercury was around 94 – Wow! I knew we were in for it. First day of June – Summer is coming to breakfast!

This past week the weather has been perfect for growing grass.

But look what else has been taking advantage of this prime growing weather:

I tried to clean this area, but apparently not well enough. So, if I want the grass seed underneath to amount to anything, I have to get out there and pull out the take-advantage weeds. I wish I had my gloves on.

Look what I found underneath the clover and other sticker plants:

As I pulled away the sticker plants I found shoots of new grass buried under there.

Crawling around in my yard on all fours, grubbing at weeds with my bare hands, with about a million other things to do right now, I thought, “Stooopid! You should have gone with the weed and feed!” But, it really didn’t take me that long to get rid of a bunch of weeds, and now the grass will grow and overtake the rest. I’ll spend a few minutes cleaning the lawn every morning after I give it a spritzer with the sprinkler, and I’m guessing I’ll have a nice bright green spot where I used to have dirt and stickers last July. 

I found a lot of surprises around my yard today. Last year I planted a blackberry vine along one fence. I love blackberries, my mom used to take us out along ditchbanks in Glenn County to pick them by the bags full. We’d take them home and I’d make a  big bubbling blackberry cobbler. My gramma used to complain about getting the seeds under her dentures, but she’d eat it anyways. Now I don’t know where to get blackberries, you have to be careful snooping around people’s private property, don’t want to get an assful of rock salt. So, when I found this little bush growing in the middle of my lawn, dropped in a bird turd I imagine, I dug it up and planted it along my fence. Grateful, it grew like crazy, bloomed, and put out over two dozen fat juicy berries. They were delicious, and we had to fight the blue jays for them. But this year, it was so dry, the poor thing didn’t really grow much, and I didn’t water it, busy with other things. But this morning I noticed, about another two dozen berries, and some of them were ripe. They taste like a sugar explosion.

Sorry, I forgot to take the picture before I ate all the fat ones. These proved to be satisfying.

In the morning when I get up, I make a cup of coffee and stumble out to my patio, as the first rays are coming out of the East. The sky is beautiful, the air is nice, and the birds are cavorting and singing and acting pretty happy to be alive. Like Amarante Cordova, they wake up every morning and say, “thank you God for letting me live another day...” Except for Hummer. Hummer wakes up every morning with a mission - none shall pass!

These are called “pink powder puffs”, “hermosa”, and some people call them “smoke trees.” The hummers and butterflies go insane over these flowers.

We have this little tree in our yard, it looks scraggly and dead all winter, but in early spring it begins to get these groovy fern leaves that close at night and open every morning, and soon after, it gets these little flowers on it. They’re really exotic looking, fluffy little pink “powder puffs”. Before the flower buds are even visible, Hummer starts standing watch, from his sentinel post at the top of our young redwood tree along the fence, or the old crepe myrtle in the middle of the lawn. He sits and sings his funny little song – this kind of chirp-buzz melody – a sort of HUM, I guess. And he’ll sail straight up in the air, until he disappears from my sight, and then drop out of the sky again like a missile, emitting this high-pitch whistle as he hurtles down. I wonder how many people have had their eyes put out by one of these little marvels. 

The Pipevine Swallowtail  butterflies like the tree too, they come in bunches when the sun is hot.  The males  fight among themselves, and there’s always a lot of courting between the males and females. But the other day as I was inspecting the drip lines in my flower beds, I witnessed a showdown between Hummer and a male butterfly.  Yeah, butterflies are testy. I’ve seen those little yellow ones go after bumble bees, and chase them away. This match between bird and bug was thrilling, like the aerial spectaculars of WWI and II! Hummer moved in with authority, as if he just expected to break up the butterfly party with one sortie. They chased him like a posse at first, then one male just started picking at him.   The others backed off as the dominant male butterfly engaged Hummer. Hummer seemed furious at first, then perplexed, then he just went up and sat on his redwood tree, to think it over? The butterflies returned to the flowers, as if the Hummer was forgotten.

Within seconds Hummer came flying off his post and routed the bunch of them, sent them fluttering off in all directions. Boy he seemed happy with himself, just full of it. He zipped around the yard several times, then sat up on the phone line over the tree, singing his little song. 

I feel lucky to be allowed in his yard. 

Thank you God, for letting me live another day.

And here’s those “barrel clover” burrs – I hate these. I spend way too much time picking them out of socks and carpeting!

Remember this picture above? This is a close up of my dead lawn. Those clover burrs are full of seeds. Those seeds sprouted with the winter rains, and I had an entire patch of that stuff. 

I know I’m not alone here. I had one search something like, “I have stickers, I want grass.” I can relate. These stickers get into my shoes and socks and really hurt. I find myself interrupted in my chores constantly, digging these little beasties out. Then there’s fox tails and the other missiles – those go in through the shoestring holes, and just keep going. I’ve had them go right through my shoes. How about those “scissor” stickers – they start out pretty little purple flowers, turn into these green spears, and when they dry out, they turn into four corkscrews, each with a nasty arrow-like head. Those are really good at burrowing into a pet’s fur. 

In spring we spend so much time picking stickers out of the dogs, it’s just stupid. And, when my old boxer got a fox tail in her throat and started to choke, it cost me an immediate $135 to get it out. It was really frightening how fast her throat swelled up, and she started to cough and stagger, going completely limp in the car on the way to the vet. When he showed me the little piece of junk that had almost killed her, I wanted to go home and cement the entire property.

You can’t mow stickers, they just grow back, lower. And mowing spreads the seeds better than anything I know.

I don’t like herbicides – I have dogs, and I just can’t believe it’s completely safe. So, I get out there with gloves, shovel, rake, hoe, and I just clean the patches up. It seems impossible, but an hour’s work in one concentrated area will really go a long way.  I loosen the roots with the shovel, I pull them out, and I rake the ground clean. 

The sprawling spot I killed last year was right in the bright, pitiless sun, so after I raked it, my husband put our big plastic swimming pool on top of it. It was hard to grow anything but stickers there, even with tons of water. I hate to think, the water I wasted trying to grow grass and little trees there.  So, I figure, we’re  using less water in our Intex easy set pool than I would have poured out on grass. We covered the immediate surrounding area with a tarp, and sections of a redwood wheelchair ramp we salvaged from an old house. 

That took care of the area I killed on purpose, but there are always patches of stickers in the little lawns we have under our shady trees that will take over all our nice grass if we let them. So, I go after those with my shovel and gloves, and I plant grass seed in the bald spots. I water those intensely, twice a day for about 10 minutes, until the grass comes in nice and thick, a couple of months. It’s best to plant grass in the fall, but if you start out with mild weather in the spring, and water it good if it doesn’t rain, you can get it established before the real heat sets in later in June. I don’t water it every day after that – I just watch it, and when it looks dry, I water it for a half hour or so in the early morning or evening. 

Here is lawn rehabilitation in progress. I notice there are still barrel stickers left – one bright green fat one right along the bottom of the picture. But see the grass seed, I lay it down thick, and then I keep the ground wet for a couple of months. I’ll get another picture of this area in a few weeks.

It always seems like hard work in the beginning, and I was tempted to get some “turf builder” or “weed and feed,” but I’m glad I didn’t. As soon as I started cleaning, mowing and got on a regular watering schedule, my yard started to become friendly again. 

Here is a close up of an area I rescued last year, this is nice healthy “fescue”. 

This little patch of oak trees made a shady spot to hang around, but the ground was hard and dry and good for nothing but fire hazard. Now it works to cool the rest of the yard and the house.