Seeding the Meadow-to-be

Sue and one of her sisters share the costs and the pleasures of maintaining a little cottage built by their father in a sea-town called Yachats (pronounced ya-HOTZ). The name means "dark water at the foot of the mountain" in the language of the Siletz people who were stewards of the land for centuries before marauding European settlers murdered and raped them and stole the land. Currently Sue and I are reading aloud to each other An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, which is blasting its way through our ignorance and awakening us to horrors committed by our so-called "Scotch-Irish" bloody-minded, violent ancestors.

Recently the little piece of forest in front of the cottage had to be razed to accommodate an improved waste water system, so we grabbed the holiday weekend as a time to drive down and seed what is now a mud-field but will become, Sue hopes, a meadow. She spread lime over the land and then seeded it with these: 4 pounds of crimson clover, two pounds of common vetch, 2.3 pounds of annual rye grass, and 3 pounds of a mixture of fescue and rye. We hope the Siletz people, who nourished and managed the land, would have approved this effort if they had lived to hear of it.