Tick Clover: A Small Manifesto
Abundance, Dispersal, and Mutual Survival
Tromping along the draw edge, a jumble of portable electric fencing heaved over my shoulder and the morning dew clawing up my thighs among the tumescent stems of prairie grass near flowering, I stagger through my steadfast work awkwardly, with the informed paranoia that microscopic chiggers are likely climbing up my pants to gorge themselves on my flesh. Behind me is a pup, learning the role and territory of a farm dog, wiggling in the dew and sniffing deeply from point to point upon the thatchy skin of the prairie. Reemerging onto the mowed lanes of the pasture, I slide the burdensome nest of wire-embedded plastic netting from off my shoulders and shake the rivulets of condensation from my legs, as the pup tumbles out of the thick grass behind me with much ungainly clamor, wiping her broad sides in the turf in a near panic. We are covered in the sticky, bristly epizoochorous seeds of tick-clover.
Epizoochory is a seed dispersal strategy employed by burdock, tick clover, agrimony, and beggar’s ticks, among other common local flora here, and in the coming few weeks my bootlaces, flannel shirts and the oddly sensitive band of hair behind my knees will undoubtedly become host to hundreds of seeds. The dogs and goats and cows will carry them from paddock to paddock, eventually grooming them out (the goats even seem to have a predilection for eating the bristly green orbs of agrimony seed) dropping them far from their parent plants.
In order to distribute themselves widely, plants have devised some crafty ways of overcoming their stationary nature. Blastochory, as exhibited by squash, is when the stem of a plant crawls along the ground and fruits well away from the parent plant. Barochory is dispersal by gravity, often aided by a spherical shape that can further roll, like a coconut or apple. Ballochory, perhaps my favorite, is explosive dissemination, prompted by hygroscopic tension within the fruit. Partridge pea in late season does this, and in bigger stands of it, under the right conditions, one can listen on still days to the tinkling of tiny seeds ejecting from their bursting pods when the midday sun causes their pods to contort and burst. Dandelions and maples and milkweed all disseminate via anemochory, or wind dispersal, and seeds which float on the water, sometimes even arriving and germinating on other continents, are hydrochorous. Endozoochory, distribution by digestion, is the other main strategy involving animals. We’ll see much of this come persimmon season in the scattered piles of seed-strewn ‘possum shit that pock-mark the dormant groves of late fall.
What we call tick-clover is a legume in the Desmodium species, replete with bean-like leaves and flowers, and a nodding if somewhat subdued vining tendency. Tick clover is a fine fodder, native and leguminous, though in my experience livestock must learn to enjoy it, and it is not always relished among certain herds. Among all livestock, I have seen individual herds and flocks demonstrate the formation of a “culture”, particularly around foraging behavior. One year’s group of goats may eat tick-clover down to the nubbins, while others barely acknowledge it. It is a valuable deer browse in the nutritionally depleted landscape of late summer, and the sticky nature of its finely hooked seeds ensure that next year’s crop will be distributed in the types of places deer tend to spend these bright, dry, shortening days.
As the pup squirms on her back and bites at the speckling of burs across her damp coat, I crouch down to help pluck a few, only to discover that my pants have been ornamented in a shotgun blast of epizoochory. More than enough of these small, flat, diamond shaped seeds will travel on the shins and shanks of whitetail deer– I may as well scrape these ones off here. It won’t be long before the agrimony begins to disperse its own prickly seeds, which in my experience are a much more bothersome and painful bur to deal with. For all its trouble, agrimony has a number of ethnobotanical and medicinal uses across continents.
Free of burs and with my burden of fencing back across my shoulder, we traipse together through the crossing of the draw where our two boars laze in the dappled darkness of leaf-shade, their bristles festooned in tick-clover, snoring ‘neath the barochorous fruits of black walnut that soon threaten to drop to the woodland duff and be further strewn by chittering bushy-tails. On the other side of the crossing is my cart, loaded with more fencing and a stout, thick-bladed scythe for penetrating the hardened stems of warm season grass and ironweed. We wend across the broad slope, cart in tow, pressing through deep vegetation, over dense clumps of grass and tough forbs. Halfway out to our next stop, a new crop of tick-clover has bloomed on our legs, so we pause to pick it off– everything is going according to plan for the Desmodium.
Upon this broad, open plain, interspersed with the occasional low-limbed pin oak or haggard red cedar, patches of profuse ironweed, each bearing a crown of vibrant purple plumage, stretch skywards, seeking the notably diminished daylight in this season of retraction. The plants all seek to spend their stored energy in the promise of their progeny– small, green acorns swell suddenly, honey locust pods fill with seed and sweet jelly, and tomatoes in the garden threaten to tear down their trellises with the weight of their pendulous fruits. The livestock, who lack the advantage of reproducing by way of dormant embryonic deposits must instead instead grow fat with grass themselves as we egress down out of photosynthetic abundance, spiraling inward. We like to see them bulging with grassy fat while the sun begins to ride slightly lower each day.
The nights have been cool as of late, and this morning I could even see my own breath while trudging in the bottomlands. This pattern won’t hold– August is always a month marked by fierce heat, and often drought. But these few days of unseasonably coolness have offered considerable respite, enough to perhaps begin slaughtering ducks. Burning sun and stifling nights remain ahead, but out in the coolness of the twisted limbs of osage, the springtime of death lays in wait and watches.
In the meantime, our garden is swelling with okra, peppers and tomatoes, and in contrast with previous years I am hardly finding the time to process them all for winter. Perhaps we will suffer the perils of my improvidence, or perhaps I’ll catch up in the nick of time. Maybe, like the swine and cattle, I will fatten myself upon fresh fodder while the gettin’ is good. With the progression of the growing season, I am always taken aback by the consistency of toil– at the moment when it seemed our gardens were finally established, thoroughly weeded and maintained comes the burden of abundance.
As I covered almost a year ago exactly, abundance is not necessarily the blessing it’s made out to be by manifestation con-artists, the gamut of which includes get-rich currency bros, psychopathic motivational speakers like Tony Robbins, crystal-fondling law-of-attraction types and fresh-faced permaculturists. Abundance requires responsibility, an ethic of redistribution, so that it does not become glut. In a world of idle grasshoppers and greedy ants, perhaps we should be more like the rolling, barochorous fruit of abandoned orchards that feeds the dirt and critters in their own neighborhood, and through this strategy, resprouts and spreads outside the bounds of capital and commodities– the wild abundance of a world unaffected by property, planning, or profit.
The readers of this almanac who know me well, or who know me in real life, will know that I have been part of a functional, anarchist outdoor kitchen cooperative for most of a decade. Like any human-centered organization that requires weekly scheduling, communication, and shared values concerning kitchen hygiene, it isn’t that easy, but we’ve managed to share space and feed each other through inhospitable weather, financial depletion, bouts of mental illness, quarantine and even having our building burnt to the ground, all moored by the rolling apple that is mutualized survival in a sea of resource competition. We provide what we have, be it labor, food, materials, or cash, and take what we need, leaving the seedy core to compost and sprout alive again in the springtime, after a winter spent eating alone or in nuclear household units.
Temporarily relegated to a quaint, janky cabin-shed until we’ve finished rebuilding the fire-ravaged building, our eating collective helps us to responsibly redistribute abundance, rather than to hoard or squander it. To view it transactionally, as is often our human tendency, my summertime cooking responsibilities are reduced to one day per week, the water is hauled and waste handled (usually), our children develop social bonds outside of their nuclear family. Mutualized survival as a strategy for functional anarchy works because if a person doesn’t fulfill their duties, we all end up hungry. And while I’m all for coalition building, at the end of the day, if there’s one party who eats and another who doesn’t, your coalition doesn’t last long. Political organizing starts in the kitchen!
And so for now, I’m happy to see my kitchen-mates consume “my” tomatoes until their needs are met– the further these fruits roll, the more we disseminate, the wider our garden, so to speak. The carcasses of blue jays sprout oaks from their rotting crops. Desmodium and agrimony hitchhike across the prairie on the hides of deer and pelts of cottontails, and solitary coconuts cross seas to arrive on foreign beaches and provide sustenance over time. Abundance only holds value with distribution.
Slogging through the deep grass, my pup and I, we finally arrive at the bottom of the slope where a century of cropping uphill has allowed once-anchored prairie earth to spill asunder, plow-torn and tilled to death, washed into the Fabius, the Mississippi and beyond, a nearly seedless desert slowly recovering by way of successive reintroductions of windblown volleys of milkweed and maple, pin oak acorns fumbled by overhead jays, and tenacious, sticky burs sown by furbearers. Pulling tick-clover from her fur, the pup watches as I scythe down another lane to move this year’s turkey crop further into the recesses of a wooded draw where in weeks ahead the acorns will mast and rain and inevitably roll away or be carried off to the waiting dirt. Goldfinches sway on the tips of seeding chicories and sunflowers, and a menagerie of fructivorous birds perch and shit wild cherry that will yield in future generations, if we manage to have birds and trees that long.
I don’t believe that greed is an innate human behavior, but a byproduct of economic systems, and to an extent, culture. It does not naturally serve the whole, even if you call it manifested abundance. Just like ‘possums and jays, humans have largely taken the flesh and left the seed, just not as much as of late. Resource sharing is a key component in most of the ecosystems that, like it or not, we happen to be a part of. Be not like Aesop’s industrious ants prepping for the end times, nor the consumptive and idle grasshopper, but be the oak, the tomato, the tick-clover that without fail puts its energy toward future sprouts in uncertain times.
Це було дуже резонуючим читанням.
Дякую!