Making Hay and Distinguished Visitors

 

 For the last three days, a contract farmer took advantage of the facts that (1) most of our snow had melted and (2) spring rains hadn't yet made the soil too wet for equipment.  He and his crew came to our grasslands and cut and baled 150 acres of native grasses.  The grasses are of low quality, so they're not valuable for feeding livestock or for animal bedding.  Instead, the baled grass will be used to grow mushrooms in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, "Mushroom Capital of North America."  Sometime in the next few months, if you buy mushrooms and they've been grown in Kennett Square, you may (indirectly) be eating our grasses!

A wider view.  Watch out, visitors on foot; the farmer stops for no one!

On Tuesday, we had a visit from the natural land stewardship crew from the Mt. Cuba Center in Hockessin, Delaware (suburban northern Delaware just west of Wilmington).  Mt. Cuba was a DuPont estate that was turned into a horticultural showplace for displaying native Piedmont plants in designed landscapes.  Fifty acres of the 385-acre estate are formal gardens; our visitors are responsible for the other 335 acres of fields, woodlands, and wetlands.

Because the du Ponts are/were fabulously wealthy, I had assumed that Mt. Cuba was like heaven on earth - that Mrs. du Pont would dispatch armies of gardeners to rout every weed on her estate.  I was quickly disabused of that notion by our visitors, who assured me that they had the same same problems with invasive plants, superabundant deer, and stormwater flooding that I face in my preserve.    

My two stewardship staff members (left) pointing out a land management feature to our three guests from Mt. Cuba.

My staff and I are going to pay a reciprocal visit to Mt. Cuba - when the weather gets better in May.  It was really cold on Tuesday.