Day Five. I still can't believe it's only Tuesday. Wow! I am going to mark down another fabulous and successful day at Appleton-Whittell Research Ranch. We woke up bright and early and were picked up at 8A.M. by Roger (who fixed our leaky kitchen sink, which was so sweet of him!) to head to work. I wasn't nearly as sore as I though I'd be. Honestly, I mostly just felt fatigued. Roger and Linda had taught us about how this land was once used to raise cattle, but that the grasses of Arizona don't do well with grazing. The U.S. Department of Agriculture developed the "perfect" grass to withstand the heat, dryness, grazing, etc. It is now called an invasive species, and has overtaken a huge percentage of the Ranch and of Arizona, in general. It grew on slopes and in a bunch of other places it wasn't supposed to, and outcompeted the native grasses. Plus, apparently, no animal likes to it it, so it seems to have been a total bust. Nice job, America!
For our mini break, we chopped down invasive honeysuckle from the Kansas ecosystem, but this is different -- you cannot just go around and rip out handfuls of grass or mow it all down because it's too time consuming, costly, and it'll just grow back. Our mission, today, was to lend a helping hand to an Arizona grass -- Sacaton. This grass, unlike invasive Bermuda Grass, grows in tall clumps and has a pretty sturdy root system. It is very used to Arizona's climate and it's frequently flooded and coated with topsoil during the monsoon season.
Using our knowledge of sacaton, we worked to help bring it back to dominance at the Ranch. First, a large circle is cut out of the bermuda grass with the weed-eater. We cut it down to the dirt to give it as little chance as possible of growing back. We rake the dead grass back and dig 10 holes for each mowed circle. That was hard work, digging hole after hole! Not "hard", really, but raking and digging for a while is just physically exhausting. Roger had to uproot some well-established sacaton from a plot and from the middle of the road, and we had to trim the grass down to about a foot tall and break up the root system to get small handfuls of the plant. Those roots are very tough and breaking them apart was nearly impossible at times. We did it, though, and planted them in their nice little holes.
Since the plants are used to the monsoons and floods of topsoil, we used a hose to
practically drown everything in the circle plot so that they have more of a chance of survival. Finally, we used the dead mowed grass as mulch around the transplanted bundles to keep moisture in and keep weeds out. The hope is that the sacaton prospers and outcompetes the low-laying bermuda grass for sunlight. Roger said that from each of the dozen plots we mowed, dug, and transplanted (over 120 plants, total!), a high success rate would be for two or three from each plot to survive. The war against bermuda grass will be a long lone.
I'm bummed because the group decided at lunch to leave a day earlier than scheduled for Kansas because I don't want to leave here, but I guess it would be nice to have a day to bum out before school starts. Beth and I climbed an epically steep hill to get a view of our work, and it was amazing! Climbing it was challenging, but the view was totally worth it. We "rock surfed" down the hill and back to work, I'm surprised I didn't wipe out on the way down.
After work, we took a mini road trip to Sierra Vista's Walmart (about a 45min drive) for some last minute groceries. Becky and I got an ice cream cone from the McDonald's there, and we spent the last twenty-something dollars of our grocery money, with 23 cents to spare! That's what I call "budgeting". The ride back was kind of hilarious because as we were entering the dirt road to the Ranch, we kept seeing this fire glow in the sky. It looked like the top of a volcano or a giant fire behind the clouds. We kept asking "what is that?!". I finally pondered "is that the moon...?", and it clicked. The moon was just rising over the mountains, it was flaming orange and bigger than I've ever seen. We all freaked out and pulled the car over to take pictures and marvel at the night sky -- it is so much more amazing when you're so far away from civilization. We made pizza for dinner when we got to the bunkhouse.
Another highlight of the night was making T-Shirts. We'd all brought a plain T-shirt and Beth brought a ton of puff paint. Our shirts look so cute, everybody tried to incorporate something from the trip -- barbed wire, mountains, the moon, etc. This is the point where my camera broke, so I didn't get any pictures for the rest of the trip =(
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