Smooth Brome Grass

What’s blooming in the area: Tea, miniature and shrub roses; Apache plume, locust, catalpa, four-wing saltbush, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, yucca, red hot poker, daylily, hollyhock, fern-leaf globemallow, yellow sweet clover, alfalfa, loco weed, sweet pea, oxalis, tumble mustard, nits-and-lice, velvetweed, white evening primrose, scarlet bee blossom, milkweed, bindweed, goat’s beard, hawkweed, May daisy, plains paper flower, Hopi tea, spine and hairy golden asters, common and native dandelions; brome, three-awn, sacaton and rice grass; buffalo gourd up; cottonwood fluff in the air.
What’s blooming in my garden, looking north: Dr. Huey and Persian yellow roses, iris, golden spur columbine, coral beardtongue, hartweig, perky Sue, chocolate flower, fern-leaf yarrow, blanket flower, coreopsis, anthemis, Mexican hat; buds on butterfly weed.
Looking east: Floribunda rose, Jupiter’s beard, Maltese cross, bouncing Bess, small-leaf soapwort, snow-in-summer, pink, sea pink, coral bells, winecup, rock rose, pink salvia, pink evening primrose, Mount Atlas daisy.
Looking south: Blaze, pasture, rugosa and rugosa hybrid roses; spirea, raspberry, beauty bush.
Looking west: Purple and white beardtongues, catmint; buds on sea lavender, ladybells and Rumanian sage.
Bedding plants: Snapdragon, sweet alyssum, petunia, moss rose, Dahlberg daisy, gazania.
Inside: Aptenia, bougainvillea, zonal geranium.
Animal sightings: Ants, aphids, moths, even smaller grasshoppers
Weather: Unwatered ground bleaching into sand; last rain 6/5/08; 15:56 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Local farmers have been cutting hay for the past week or so. The fields will soon go dormant, but they’ll get at least one more crop this fall when temperatures cool again.
When I mentioned this to a friend from Santa Fe, he remembered the beauty of alfalfa fields in bloom when he was driving through Colorado. I suddenly realized that while I’d always been told people here grew alfalfa and my friend assumed hay meant alfalfa, that’s not what’s being cut.
Medicago sativa is a legume with triplets of oval leaves that looks like young sweet clover from a distance; this is a grass. Alfalfa has purple flowers; this has tiny, 3/8" long narrow yellow flowers with darker anthers that hang from the spikelets. The one looks blue green from the road; this was bright green when it revived in spring, and still wears a yellowish inflection. The county extension agent, Tony Valdez, says most of it is smooth brome, a native of the steppes that stretch from the Carpathian Basin to Siberia.
It’s easy to understand why I would get it wrong, to say my eyes saw what my ears heard. But why would a local man with roots deep in the valley tell me he was surrounded by alfalfa farmers when most of the fields I see in the area by the village where he lives are abandoned or brome?
It could be a plumber my age has no more ties to farming than I had as a child. It’s also possible alfalfa was growing when he first looked. There still is one field down the road and escaped plants bloom elsewhere along the shoulder. While alfalfa can grow in pure stands, experts recommend mixing Bromus inermis with legumes or other grasses to prevent it from choking when its rhizomatous roots become too dense. The two perennials may have coexisted until grasshopper depredations favored the one.
Like most of us he may continue to see what he remembers until change is too stark to dismiss. Pigweed is now tall enough to be mistaken for alfalfa, and many mow it down in the fall when it turns brown. Fallow fields, pasture, and grass hay look alike from a distance.
The failure to see what’s growing may also reflect a romantic assumption that when an insulated area changed with World War II, the old ways froze. In fact, the farmers down the road are modern enough to adopt a Hungarian selection that has been promoted by the agriculture department since 1942 to restore rangelands destroyed by dust bowl droughts in the 1930's.
Even in the depression, when traditional farmers were growing alfalfa, they were adapting new ideas. The Interior Department observed some 300 acres growing in the area surrounding Santa Cruz and believed it was used to improve chili lands, rather than feed domestic livestock.
At the time, government agents complained many didn’t bother to level the fields they watered from local ditches. As a result, water didn’t flow evenly to crops and often formed destructive sheets. The men down the road from me didn’t buy or inherit flat lands; they worked to make them even below dike walls of dirt before they installed pumps to pull water up from the aquifer.
One man weathered by age still lets the water spill directly into his field from some dozen wells; the younger men have recently invested in large diameter pipe segments with imbedded spouts that spread the water across the high end, but still depend on flooding to cover the fields. Their techniques are modernized versions of traditional acequias.
In the depression fields were seldom more than the few acres that survived the subdivisions of generations and were worked with hand tools. Long ago farmers bought tractors, but the ones I follow down the road are small because the fields are still relatively small. Men who grew up when land was divided by death now sell sections farthest from their wells for ready cash. They are reproducing their traditional patchwork landscape on land that was not farmed when they were children, this time with brome grass scattered between new homes.
It is the persistence of these familiar patterns that obscures the substitution of plants and technology from those of us who look but do not see.
Notes:
US Dept of Interior, Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975.Valdez, Tony. Rio Arriba County extension agent, email, 9 June 2008.
Photograph: Smooth brome grass blooming near the orchards, 7 June 2008.