And it will go crazy there. Here in our very rural area where there's still some unpaved roads and many, like ours, where the so-called paved roads are just crushed rocks coated with tar (a big improvement, nonetheless, over the dirt road we had when we moved here), the bermuda often pops up and grows in cracks in the road. Bermuda grass loves grave driveways---the gravel serves as a mulch that helps hold in moisture and keep the bermuda grass green and lush. It isn' t so bad in the areas where your tires compact the gravel and soil as you drive up the driveway, but the other areas have to be mowed weekly to keep the grass short.....and it invades every area adjacent to the driveway.

Yesterday while at a wildfire at the extreme west end of our county (we actually hit the spot where the roads end and go no further), where the soil is basically pure sand that runs hundreds of feet deep, I found something less likable than bermuda grass. Grass burrs. I don't mean an occasional one here or there like we might see in the sandier portions of our place---it was like a solid sod of them, and I was in a very well-kept front yard at a very well-dept house. I really wanted to ask the resident why he didn't use a pre-emergent herbicide to prevent them or a post-emergent herbicide to kill them. I had the burrs so thickly stuck in the soles of my shoes that it was like walking with a thick layer of mud caked on the bottom of your feet. I had 5 or 6 layers of grass burrs stuck to one another on the soles of my shoes (and elsewhere....socks, tops of shoes, shoe laces, hem of pants, etc.). I had to scrape them off the soles of my shoes before I got back into the truck so that we wouldn't have grass burrs all over the truck. As we drove away, headed to another fire in another place (with, hooray, hooray, lots of rocks and bermuda grass) I was just excited because we were leaving the grass burrs behind. It was almost enough to make you appreciate having bermuda grass. Almost.

If bermuda grass is the devil (and we all know it is), then a solid sod of grass burrs is the devil's cousin.

Oh my gosh! Of course you realize it is impossible not to laugh. But laughing in empathy AND sympathy!

Well. I don't mind mowing one little bit with my trusty electric starter mulching mower. And if we decide we don't like it, we can always retreat and regroup. My thinking was that it might help in holding the gravel that inevitably gets moved down the driveway in a gulley washer. Might. . . .

Our entire property slopes, although the house and detached garage are on the most level ground we have. Our driveway washes out constantly. The bermuda grass and weeds growing in the middle of the driveway will hold the middle in place, but heavy rainfall (twice since moving here, we've had over 12" of rain in one 24-hour period) will wash out the driveway on either side of the center. We spend a lot of time regrading our driveway in very wet years.

The grass burr thing was crazy. I couldn't even believe my eyes. I've never seen grass burr plants as thick as grass sod, or so covered in grass burrs that they stuck to one's shoes in layers like that. Luckily (in the oddest sort of way), when we left the wildfire located at the west end of the county, we went to the north-central part of the county. I still had grass burrs in my shoe soles, but not nearly as much as I had originally. When we got to the rocky hills where the other wildfire was burning, it only took a few minutes of walking on the rocky terrain to knock the rest of the grass burrs off my shoes for me. So, I guess going to the third fire saved me from having to sit here at home and slowly pull one grass burr after another out of the soles of my shoes.

I've long known there were tremendous differences in the soil and plants in western Love county compared to what is found in eastern Love County, but every time we are out west, I am astonished all over again at the different challenges they face.....it is like it is a whole different country out there. Being in the middle of the state (I-35 which runs north-south cuts our county in half), we have a big terrain change roughly right along I-35. To its east, and for a couple of miles west of I-35, we have a lot more clay and sandy loam instead of pure sand, tons of woodland and a lot more rainfall. The further west you go, the smaller the trees get (except in the river bottom land), the sandier the soil gets, and the drier it gets. Often, they'll have huge hordes of grasshoppers eating everything in sight out west a month or more before we see them further east. I guess they come here after they've devoured everything worth eating out west. When one of my farming or gardening friends out west tells me that the grasshoppers are destroying their gardens, I know that we'll be in the same boat in a few weeks. It's nice to get that little bit of a heads up.