The Largest Garden in Northeast Oregon

Published in The Christian Science Monitor

            April 14, we moved into the house on the ranch in Whitney Valley in Northeastern Oregon's Blue Mountains. April 15, I started work as caretaker of the ranch. I zigzagged the meadows on the small motorcycle provided by the ranch owners and spread water from the north fork of the Burnt River, from Camp Creek, and from several springs across about 800 acres of meadow, figuring out how the irrigation worked as I went. I improved ditches with a sharp shovel.

            Years before, high water had washed out the dirt dike across the top of the lower Camp Creek field. I hooked the back blade to the tractor and bladed ditches down that field, where I saw traces of ditches filled in by time. The sharp corner of the blade curled long strips of turf out of the ditches. I loaded turf onto a trailer behind the tractor, hauled it to the top of the field and placed it where I wanted the dike.

            I shoveled dirt that had been cleared from a ditch above the barn years before onto the trailer, hauled it to the Camp Creek field, and added to the dike until it was tall enough to turn water across the top of the field and into the ditches I had bladed.

            Across the river from the Camp Creek field, working with a shovel because the ground was too wet with spring runoff to get onto with the tractor, I extended ditches onto ground that had never been irrigated. I rebuilt other dikes.

            Water turned onto ground that had been dry increased the growth and greenness of the plants native to the area. The second year, we had hay worth cutting. The third year, the grasses and forbs grew lush and deep green, and we took a heavy harvest.

            When I walked along the ditches, I found mounds of soil packed into small, round, pebble-like forms. These were earthworm castings. The mounds of castings contained tiny, newly-hatched worms too numerous to count. When I turned water down the ditches, the castings and new worms washed out onto newly irrigated ground. The wet soil gave the worms an environment in which they could thrive, grow, and reproduce. I knew the value of the work worms did from my research for gardening.

            As worms work their way through the soil, they ingest soil and organic material and leave behind the pebbly castings that contain up to twelve times the amount of plant nutrients as unprocessed soil. The soil they cast is much looser and better aerated than the soil before worms work it.

            Earthworms were the farmers on the ranch. I kept the ground wet enough that they could live in it and work it. They improved the soil. Incidental to the ranchers but of prime importance to me, dozens of kinds of birds; elk, deer, coyotes, badgers, bobcats, beavers, and other wildlife made good use of the rich growth and moist earth.

            By the end of my third irrigation season, Mike and John, owners of the ranch, understood I was serious about getting the best crop of hay possible from the ranch. That year, I said I needed the backhoe and the dump truck to move more dirt than I could move by hand, and they let me take the machines from their home ranch near Unity up to the Whitney ranch.

            I dug out big ditches that had accumulated sediment over the years. I reset washed out culverts and built more dikes with the sediment I dug from ditches. I irrigated more of the ranch. Earthworms kept working. The hay crop continued to improve.

            Several years into that job, when we harvested the hay, John came up and drove one swather while I drove the other. About three fourths of the way through the cutting, John said, "We're cutting a really good crop of hay, aren't we?"

            I said, "Yes, it's a good crop."

            We harvested more than twice as much hay that year as we had harvested my first year. I didn't get paid more for a good crop of hay, but pay wasn't my primary motivation.

            I did the job as well as I could because it was the biggest garden I ever took care of. I wanted to see what its potential, fulfilled, would come to. I loved helping provide habitat for and seeing all the geese, cranes, snipes, ducks, rails, and other wildlife that liked wet, lush meadows.

            Water and deep soil and earthworms and I and, most of all, the force which animates all life worked well together on that mountain valley ranch, ostensibly to achieve a good crop of hay, but toward the deeper purpose of improving wildlife habitat, and even deeper than that, to demonstrate how all of us working together brought the meadow fully to life.