By Bill Kleiman

Spring beauty are one of the early wildflowers to come up in our oak woods. They are crazy beautiful making us thankful for spring. 

Spring cleaning. Above is old junk dumped in a ditch that we are cleaning up this week. In our grandparents time it was common to have a ditch on the back acreage to dump your abandoned old fence wire, broken implements, household appliances, tires, and in this case thousands of bottles and cans. We shun this dumping today, but we have sanitary landfills and recycling services our grandparents did not have.

An earlier post showed a time lapse of me brush mowing to reveal this VW Thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SrNRwR49tY

Bill Nordman worked wonders with his excavator to pull all the big stuff out of the ditch. We set aside tires to have ground up. We scrap ironed what steel we could. Some junk went to the landfill, and some was buried. This old trailer could have been yours.

With the big stuff gone, we then had 15 volunteers come out and start picking up the little stuff. In two hours we filled up 30 large trash barrels of litter. Not the yellow 5 gallon buckets, but those big green barrels.

The ditch is now rather clean.

Birdsfoot trefoil is an invasive weed, also used as a pasture plant. Invasive weeds are a biological pollution. Their pollution stays a long time. Annually we search for the occurrences and treat the ones that emerged from the seed bank. For decades we track and treat this pollution. We keep after the weeds, we are happy weed warriors most of the time; but it is satisfying to just pick up some litter.